ASE contrast improvement with a non-linear filtering Sagnac interferometer

Renault, A.; Auge-Rochereau, Frederika; Planchon, Thomas A.; D’Oliveira, P.; Auguste, T.; Chériaux, G.; Chambaret, Jean-Paul

doi:10.1016/j.optcom.2004.12.038

Cited by 31 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…It is observed that the generated XPW spectrum contains new frequencies in addition to the pump spectrum. Beside XPW, other techniques like plasma mirrors Doumy et al (2004), Sagnac interferometers Renault et al (2005), and self diffraction Liu and Kobayashi (2010) can be used to enhance the temporal contrast of laser pulses (Table 3.2). Among these methods, XPW is chosen and implemented in an OPCPA setup described in Sect.…”

Section: Self Diffractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broadband Seed Generation

Fattahi

2015

Third-Generation Femtosecond Technology

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A major requirement for developing the OPCPA systems discussed in Chap. 1, is the availability of seed pulses with a broadband spectrum, a well-behaved spectral phase, and preferably a stable carrier envelope phase (CEP).Traditionally, OPCPA seeds were provided by using low-energy broadband spectrum of a Ti:sapphire oscillator Ishii et al. (2005). The seed pulses in this case have a good temporal contrast, well-behaved spectral phase and their carrier envelope phase offset can be actively stabilized Telle et al. (2014). By using the oscillator to seed the OPCPA chain and the OPCPA pump laser, pump and seed pulses are intrinsically synchronized Teisset et al. (2005). However due to the long optical beam path difference between seed and pump pulses, mechanical vibrations of optical components and temperature drifts additional timing jitter happens, which needs to be compensated by an active temporal synchronization system (Teisset 2009;Schwarz et al. 2012;Fattahi et al. 2012). Despite all the above mentioned advantages the pulse energy is limited to several tens of nJ. This can be resolved by using an additional OPCPA stage or generating the seed via supercontinuum after boosting the output of the oscillator in a regenerative amplifier. However, this results in more superfluorescence (Tavella et al. 2006) in the first approach and degraded temporal contrast in the second approach.Recently demonstrated kerr-lens mode-locked Yb:YAG thin-disk oscillators (Pronin et al. 2011) are a promising alternative to Ti:sapphire as the front-end of OPCPA systems. Their relatively narrowband spectrum can be externally broadened in a cascaded nonlinear stage. Compression of the broadened spectrum results in 10 fs pulses with 260 nJ of energy at 40 MHz repetition rate (Seidel et al. 2014). The average power of these reproducible waveform-controlled few-cycle pulses exceeds the average power of Ti:sapphire oscillators by more than one order of magnitude. These externally CEP stabilized pulses (Pronin et al. 2013) combined with optical synchronization provides a suitable OPCPA seed at µJ-levels of energy.The need for an active pump-signal temporal synchronization system can be eliminated by generating the broadband seed from a near-1-ps OPCPA pump pulses. In spite of several attempts to generate such a broadband spectrum via supercontinuum generation with sub-100-fs pump pulses in solids and waveguides (Seidel et al. 2014;

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Section: Self Diffractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broadband Seed Generation

Fattahi

2015

Third-Generation Femtosecond Technology

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“…-non-linear Sagnac interferometer Renault et al (2005). It applies a Sagnac interferometer -containing a beam splitter and two mirrors-a filter and a Kerr nonlinear medium.…”

Section: Summary Of the Relevant Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrast Improvement of Relativistic Few-Cycle Light Pulses

Veisz¹

2010

Coherence and Ultrashort Pulse Laser Emission

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“…This non-linear filter seems to be nowadays the most powerful technique to increase the contrast. The methods used are numerous; saturable absorber [61], non-linear Sagnac interferometer [62], non-linear induced polarization rotation in hollow fiber [63], or in the air [64] and cross-polarized wave generation [65]. With this last technique also named XPW, it has been demonstrated a contrast improvement of almost 5 orders of magnitude at the milli-joule level with 40 fs pulse duration ( figure 11).…”

Section: Temporal Contrast Of Intense Pulsementioning

confidence: 99%