Highly flexible, kilowatt-class thin-disk multipass amplifier and its applications in material processing

We present in this contribution a Yb:YAG thin-disk multipass amplifier delivering sub-2 ps pulses with kilowatt of average output power at a highly flexible repetition rates ranging from MHz to several GHz. The system, developed within the european project kW-Flexiburst, delivers laser pulses from single pulse to bursts of pulses with arbitrary number of pulses (1, 3, 5, …, 1000) at up to 7.5 GHz of intra-burst repetition rate. A seed laser delivering stretched pulses at an average output power of 50 W for a single pulse configuration and up to 230 W for GHz-bursts with more than 3 pulses/burst was used. In a single pulse configuration, an average output power of up to 655 W whereas up to 1090 W were extracted in burst operation at an intra-burst repetition-rate of 1GHz. During the talk, few examples of applications using our laser will be presented.