Amplification of femtosecond laser pulses typically requires a lasing medium or a nonlinear crystal. In either case, the chemical properties of the lasing medium or the momentum conservation in the nonlinear crystal constrain the frequency and the bandwidth of the amplified pulses. We demonstrate high gain amplification (greater than 1000) of widely tunable (0.5 to 2.2 micrometers) and short (less than 60 femtosecond) laser pulses, up to intensities of 1 terawatt per square centimeter, by seeding the modulation instability in an YAlO crystal pumped by femtosecond near-infrared pulses. Our method avoids constraints related to doping and phase matching and therefore can occur in a wider pool of glasses and crystals even at far-infrared frequencies and for single-cycle pulses. Such amplified pulses are ideal to study strong-field processes in solids and highly excited states in gases.
A new amplification method based on the optical Kerr instability is suggested and theoretically analyzed, with emphasis on the near-to mid-infrared wavelength regime. Our analysis for CaF 2 and KBr crystals shows that one to two cycle pulse amplification by 3-4 orders of magnitude in the wavelength range from 1 − 14 µm is feasible with currently available laser sources. At 14 µm final output energies in the 50 µJ range are achievable corresponding to about 0.2-0.25% of the pump energy. The Kerr instability presents a promising process for the amplification of ultrashort mid-infrared pulses.
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