106 W, picosecond Yb-doped fiber MOPA system with a radially polarized output beam

We report the generation of high average output power, high peak power and high pulse energy radially polarized picosecond pulses from a compact gain-switched laser-diode-seeded Yb-doped fiber (YDF) master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system. A q-plate was employed as a mode converter prior to the final power amplifier to efficiently convert the linearly polarized Gaussian-shaped beam into a donut-shaped radially polarized beam. The desired vector beam was efficiently amplified yielding ~110ps pulses with a maximum output pulse energy of ~30.7µJ and a peak power of ~280kW at a repetition rate of 1.367MHz. The average power was scaled up to 106W by increasing the repetition rate to 5.468MHz