Bifurcation suppression for stability improvement in Nd:YVO 4 regenerative amplifier

Continuously pumped regenerative amplifiers are subject to energy instability at high pulse repetition rates due to period doubling bifurcation. Theoretical and experimental data are presented, in order to differentiate and understand instability effects in Nd:YVO4 regenerative amplifier, and possible techniques for performance optimization are analyzed. An increase in the seed pulse energy is demonstrated to improve amplification dynamics. Addition of a preamplifier is shown as an efficient way to achieve seed energy high enough to provide stable operation at repetition rates up to 200 kHz with average output power near the theoretical limit.