An optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier for seeding high repetition rate free-electron lasers

Abstract

High repetition rate free-electron lasers (FEL), producing highly intense extreme ultraviolet and x-ray pulses, require new high power tunable femtosecond lasers for FEL seeding and FEL pump-probe experiments. A tunable, 112 W (burst mode) optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier (OPCPA) is demonstrated with center frequencies ranging from 720-900 nm, pulse energies up to 1.12 mJ and a pulse duration of 30 fs at a repetition rate of 100 kHz. Since the power scalability of this OPCPA is limited by the OPCPA-pump amplifier, we also demonstrate a 6.7-13.7 kW (burst mode) thin-disk OPCPA-pump amplifier, increasing the possible OPCPA output power to many hundreds of watts. Furthermore, third and fourth harmonic generation experiments are performed and the results are used to simulate a seeded FEL with high-gain harmonic generation.

High Average Power Near‐Infrared Few‐Cycle Lasers

“…OPCPA provides few‐cycle pulses with very good CEP stability and average powers up to 22 W at 1 MHz repetition rate and up to 53 W at 1 kHz repetition rate . The concept is particularly well suited to provide wavelength‐tunable pulses for spectroscopic applications and to explore wavelength ranges that lack of powerful lasers. However, their power scaling is hindered by thermo‐optical effects arising from absorption of the interacting waves.…”

First experimental results towards a 100 W wavelength tunable femtosecond OPCPA

“…8 In the case of a wavelength-tunable a variable prism stretcher can be used (Ref. 1 ). Thereafter the signal pulses are amplified in a three stage non-collinear optical parametric amplifier.…”

“…1 This system was tunable over the range from 720 to 900 nm, with pulse energies above 1 mJ, pulse durations of 30 fs and excellent beam quality (Fig. 3).…”

Broadband, picosecond two-stage optical parametrical chirped pulse amplification system at 100 Hz

“…This kind of experimental campaigns requires laser drivers with peak power of 100's of TW to PW, less than 100 fs pulse duration regime [5][6][7][8][9][10] with tunable central wavelength because of maximizing the a 0 ∝ Iλ 2 (normalized laser potential). Moreover, also a laser system with high repetition rate, in the mJ energy range and tunable, can meet the needs of the accelerator community, among others in laser-induced FEL seeding and FEL pump-probe experiments [11].…”