ABSTRACT
Pulsed ber lasers with pulse durations in the picosecond to nanosecond regime can be achieved with Q-switched lasers or master oscillator power ampliers (MOPAs) with pulsed seeds. These ber lasers can be made robustly with compact monolithic designs capable of delivering pulse energies from nanojoules to millijoules and average powers from a few watts to hundreds of watts, sufcient for a wide range of applications including printing, remote sensing, LIDAR, microelectronic device fabrication, frequency conversion (for applications ranging from laser projection in the visible to EUV lithography through laser-plasma interaction), marking, engraving, welding, machining, etc. This was the rst signicant market for ber lasers and still is a very important market segment for ber lasers. We will not cover picosecond mode-locked ber lasers in this chapter, since mode-locked ber lasers are discussed in Chapter 11.
