Abstract

Production of high repetition rate, high energy pulses at an eye safe wavelength has become a topic of interest for emerging technologies. 1.5 µm is an eye safe wavelength that is used extensively in telecom and erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) are common. EDFAs however, have difficulties producing high energy, higher repetition rate pulsed systems with low efficiencies due to quantum defect [1]. A proposed solution is to produce a diamond Raman laser that is seeded with a pulsed 1064 nm source. The thesis covers the design and build of the seed for the diamond Raman laser. The project requires five separate pulsed seed systems to be built, and then combined and further amplified to then be used in a diamond Raman laser. The system needs to be portable and easily reproduced while limiting size, weight, power, costs, and complexity. A common design when building a pulsed laser system, is the Master Oscillator Power Amplifier (MOPA) design. The MOPA design allows for flexibility through a tunable oscillator and multiple amplification stages which is why it is chosen for the initial design. In this thesis, a MOPA is built to provide pulsed output with a 10-20 ns pulse width, > 2 mJ energy, and 10 kHz repetition rate. The design used Nd:YVO4 as the active material in the oscillator and Ytterbium doped fiber amplifiers (YDFA). Pulses are generated using an Acousto-Optic Modulator (AOM) within the oscillator. The thesis covers the build and design of the oscillator and the first fiber amplifier with the second amplifier to be built in future experiments. The system is tested at each stage of the build and issues that arose during testing are documented along with the solutions created to fix the system and ways to enhance it in the future.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2022

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Richardson, Martin

Degree

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Optics and Photonics

Department

Optics and Photonics

Degree Program

Optics and Photonics; Photonics

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0009063; DP0026396

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0026396

Language

English

Release Date

May 2027

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Campus-only Access)

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Restricted to the UCF community until May 2027; it will then be open access.

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