1-ps Thin disk amplifier for advanced materials processing

We demonstrate femtosecond and picoseconds thin disk laser amplifiers based on Yb:YAG as gain material. We obtained a pulse duration of 1 ps in a chirped pulse amplification (CPA) scheme and a pulse duration of about 30 ps in a CPA-free amplifier configuration. Pumped by a max of 70W we obtained an average output power of 20W and pulse energies up to 500μJ.