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Optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) exploit second-order nonlinearity to transfer energy from a fixed frequency pump pulse to a variable frequency signal pulse, and represent an easy way of tuning over a broad range the frequency of an otherwise fixed femtosecond laser system. OPAs can also act as broadband amplifiers, transferring energy from a narrowband pump to a broadband signal and thus considerably shortening the duration of the pump pulse. Due to these unique properties, OPAs are nowadays ubiquitous in ultrafast laser laboratories, and are employed by many users, such as solid state physicists, atomic/molecular physicists, chemists and biologists, who are not experts in ultrafast optics. This tutorial paper aims at providing the non-specialist reader with a self-consistent guide to the physical foundations of OPAs, deriving the main equations describing their performance and discussing how they can be used to understand their most important working parameters (frequency tunability, bandwidth, pulse energy/repetition rate scalability, control over the carrier-envelope phase of the generated pulses). Based on this analysis, we derive practical design criteria for OPAs, showing how their performance depends on the type of the nonlinear interaction (crystal type, phase-matching configuration, crystal length), on the characteristics of the pump pulse (frequency, duration, energy, repetition rate) and on the OPA architecture.

Ultrafast mid-infrared (IR) coherent radiation plays an important role in strong-field physics, wherein the use of longer wavelengths has reduced the optical intensities needed to drive light-matter interactions by orders of magnitude in comparison to near-IR radiation. Optimizing parametric interactions for generation and characterization of mid-IR pulses is an enabling step for those applications. We report on the production of >50 µJ femtosecond pulses centered at 5 µm in a two-stage optical parametric amplifier (OPA) based on ZnGeP, a high-performance optical material in this spectral region. The OPA is pumped by an ultrafast 2-µm source. Amplified pulses have been characterized by parametric upconversion, enabling the use of standard silicon detectors. A numerical model of the system has been developed and tested to control dispersion, group-velocity mismatch, and off-axis parametric fluorescence. The source architecture is suitable for production of mJ-level mid-IR ultrafast pulses without the use of chirped-pulse amplification, where convenient pumping could be realized directly by mid-IR laser sources based on materials such as Cr:ZnSe or Cr:ZnS.

We describe the production of 2.2-mJ, ∼6 optical-cycle-long mid-infrared laser pulses with a carrier wavelength of 2.05 μm in a two-stage β-BaB2O4 nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier design with a mixed phase matching scheme, which is pumped by a standard Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification system. It is demonstrated that relatively high pulse energies, short pulse durations, high stability, and excellent beam profiles can be obtained using this simple approach, even without the use of optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification.

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