Broadband amplification by picosecond OPCPA in DKDP pumped at 515 nm

Abstract

On the quest towards reaching petawatt-scale peak power light pulses with few-cycle duration, optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) pumped on a time scale of a few picoseconds represents a very promising route. Here we present an experimental demonstration of few-ps OPCPA in DKDP, in order to experimentally verify the feasibility of the scheme. Broadband amplification was observed in the wavelength range of 830-1310 nm. The amplified spectrum supports two optical cycle pulses, at a central wavelength of ~920 nm, with a pulse duration of 6.1 fs (FWHM). The comparison of the experimental results with our numerical calculations of the OPCPA process showed good agreement. These findings confirm the reliability of our theoretical modelling, in particular with respect to the design for further amplification stages, scaling the output peak powers to the petawatt scale.

High efficiency, multi-mJ, sub 10 fs, optical parametric amplifier at 3 kHz

“…The careful optimization of the pump intensity on the crystal, temporal stretching ratio between pump and seed and reusing the residual pump energy allowed reaching the high conversion efficiency. The experimental results are fully consistent with the outcome from our "2D" in house-written code [11]. The 350 nm broad OPA signal supports a time bandwidth limited pulse duration of 5.7 fs (FWHM).…”

Generation and Parametric Amplification of Few‐Cycle Light Pulses at Relativistic Intensities

“…In the first (small) OPA stages, DKDP was later replaced by lithium triborate (LBO) owing to its superior nonlinear properties. As a result, in the design of the system the total number of required stages could be reduced from eight to five [48,49].…”

“…In particular OPA with its ability to generate ultra-broadband pulses with high energy has raised a great interest [42,48,51,60,61,104,105]. While analytical considerations such as presented in Section 2.2.1 help to identify the important quantities and constraints, they generally have to make certain assumptions to be analytically solvable.…”

Thin disk picosecond pump laser for jitter stabilized kHz OPCPA

“…Thin disk lasers have received much attention recently as a means of producing pulse trains with large pulse energies (> 25 mJ) and high repetition rates (> 3 kHz). The potential to use thin disk technology to pump OPCPA amplifiers in order to produce high average power, high energy, ultra-short pulse trains has been recognized and much progress has already been made integrating thin disk pump lasers with OPCPA amplifiers [2], [3].…”