Description

Ti:Sapphire (Titanium doped Sapphire, Al2O3:Ti3+) has a wide range of emission band from 660 to 1050 nm, which faciitates a variety of existing and potential applications, such as tunable continuous-wave lasers, mode-locked oscillators, chirp-pulse amplifiers, thin disk oscillators/amplifiers and lidars. Moreover, the absorption band of Ti:Sapphire is centered at 490 nm, ranging from 400 to 650 nm, which makes it suitable for pump sources of many different lasers, for example, argon ion, frequency doubled Nd:YAG (Nd:YLF), and copper vapor lasers. Because of 3.2 s fluorescence lifetime, Ti:Sapphire crystals can be effectively pumped by flash lamps in high-power laser systems.

In order to obtain good quality of Ti:Sapphire crystals, the Ti3+ doping concentration has to be kept fairly low (e.g. 0.15% or 0.25%). Therefore limited pump absorption usually enforces the use of a crystal length of several millimeters, which in combination with the small pump spot size (for high pump intensity) means that a rather high pump brightness is required. Fortunately, Sapphire has also an excellent thermal conductivity, alleviating thermal effects even for high laser powers.

Features

• Large gain-bandwidth
• Very large emission bandwidth
• Excellent thermal conductivity
• Short excited-state lifetime (3.2 us)
• High saturation power
• Relatively high laser cross-sections
• High damage threshold
• Strong Kerr effect
• Wide possible pump wavelengths

Applications

• Femtosecond pulse lasers
• High repetition rate oscillators
• Chirped-pulse laser amplifiers
• Multi-pass amplifiers
• Regenerative amplifiers
• Wavelength tunable CW lasers
• Pulsed X-ray generation
• Thin disk oscillator
• Petawatt laser systems

Parameters

Specifications