Compression of picosecond pulses from a thin-disk laser to 30fs at 4W average power

Abstract

We investigate two approaches for the spectral broadening and compression of 1-ps long pulses of a thin-disk laser amplifier running at 50 kHz repetition rate at 1030 nm wavelength. We find that with a single, 2.66-m long stretched flexible hollow fiber filled with xenon gas, Fourier transform limited output pulse duration of 66 fs can be directly reached. For larger pulse shortening, we applied a hybrid cascaded approach involving a BBO-based pre-compressor and a long hollow fiber. We could achieve 33-times temporal shortening of 1-ps pulses down to a duration of 30 fs at an overall efficiency of ~29% with an output power level of 3.7 W. These results demonstrate the potential of stretched flexible fibers with their free length scalability for shortening laser pulses of moderate peak power.

Pulse propagation in hollow-core fiber at high-pressure regime: application to compression of tens of μJ pulses and determination of nonlinear refractive index of xenon at 103 μm

“…While the gain bandwidth of Yb-doped fiber is not as broad as Ti-Sapphire, Yb-doped glass offers the potential of high average power with tunable repetition rate up to megahertz while still delivered sufficient peak intensity for light-matter interaction of interest. Sub-picosecond pulses at repetition rate of hundreds of kilohertz and average power of hundreds of Watts have already been demonstrated [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Combining with spectral broadening via noble gasfilled HCF, the shortcoming of narrower bandwidth can be overcome.…”

“…Application of Yb-doped amplifier to EUV generation has also been recently demonstrated [9][10][11][12][13]. While spectral broadening and temporal compression of Yb-doped laser are easily achievable at hundreds of microjoules to millijoules level [4][5][6][7][8]13], spectral broadening in tens of microjoules and megahertz level is relatively harder to realize. Given that most commercially available Ybdoped laser are operated in this regime, an understanding in the temporal compression in this regime is highly beneficial for further application such as optical pump-probe spectroscopy, higher-order harmonic generation and high-power terahertz generation.…”

High-energy few-cycle pulses: post-compression techniques

“…For comparison, the largest compression factor obtained by a standard 1 m long HCF is 13.1 [129]. The largest compression factors obtained by cascaded setups are 92.3 with multi-pass cells [69], 84.2 by HC-PCFs [108], 53 by multi-plate arrangements [56], 48.5 by a combination of a multi-pass cell and a subsequent HCF [205] and 38.1 by HCFs [131] and 33 by cascaded second-order nonlinearity followed by an SF-HCF [206].…”

Temporal quality of post-compressed pulses at large compression factors

“…Industrygrade, high-power picosecond ytterbium (Yb)-based lasers can thus be directly converted into femtosecond sources, making it possible to extend their high repetition rate, power-scalability and reliability to ultrafast strong field physics [4,5,6]. Compressing the input pulse to less than a tenth of its original duration in a single compression stage has been demonstrated multiple times [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15], with a recent record approaching a compression factor of 40 in a single compression stage [5].…”