Work Package 1: Gigapico Frontend Systems
About
Lead by UBx, the overall aim of WP1 is to develop an innovative front-end delivering bursts of picosecond pulses at a tunable GHz repetition rate with moderate power to be further amplified up to the kW level in WP2 and WP3.
The specific objectives are to:
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- Develop a tunable Gigahertz frequency comb source module 
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- Develop a laser module with user controlled mode operation and amplified dispersion managed bursts of ps pulses 
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- Develop a broadband tunable laser module with an adjustable burst repetition rate ranging from 100kHz to 20MHz and arbitrary shaping of the bursts of ps pulses 
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- Develop a novel synchronization system capable of locking the burst pulses to the limited stability target rotation. 

Gigapico V1
Gigapico v1 ....
The amplified Gigapico V1 has been successfully installed at CNRS
Thanks to our researchers (and models) Lilia and Hugo. Photo courtesy of © Rémi Meyer
Gigapico V2
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Laser Specifications: High and Low Number of Pulses per Burst with the Same Amplifiers
One of the key difficulties experienced in delivering a flexible laser system, is the accommodation of low and high number of pulses per burst, which impacts both the dispersion and the nonlinear effects. The goal thereby was to avoid moving parts which could highly affect the stability and performance of the laser system. The consortium has therefore decided to build the laser with two regimes that can be operated without changing nor moving any of the optics:
Operation mode with 1-3-5 pulses: This operation mode is dedicated to process materials at very high pulse energy, which is particularly attractive for large-area processing using with shaped beams. In this operation mode, the burst repetition rate has been fixed at 100 kHz and the intra-burst pulse separation is also fixed to 50 MHZ (20 ns). The recent results of the literature show that an odd number of pulses is beneficial (hence 1-3-5 pulses), and at around 1 ns delay, the specific ablation rate of metals drastically reduces before increasing again at 10-20 ns separation time between the pulses. In the single pulse case, the output power will be limited to 300 W, corresponding to an energy of 3 mJ, which is enough for the targeted applications. For pulse number from 3 to ~10, the output power will be 1 kW.
Operation mode with high number of pulses: In this operation mode regime, 15 different frequencies will be available from 1 to 7.5 GHz, the number of pulses will vary between several tens to several thousands (the maximum number of pulses in a burst is simply limited by the burst repetition rate). This fixed set of frequencies is a minor deviation in comparison to what was initially planned (continuous modification of the intra-burst repetition rate) but will greatly simplify the system and make it more easily programmable, while the impact on the end-users applications is negligible.