Highly stable, 15 W, few-cycle, 65 mrad CEP-noise mid-IR OPCPA for statistical physics

Laser-induced damage of nonlinear crystals in ultrafast, high-repetition-rate, mid-infrared optical parametric amplifiers pumped at 1 µm

“…6). Bulk KNbO3-based and LiNbO3-based power OPA's were shown to deliver 19 W of average power at 160 kHz in 97 fs pulses 15 and 15 W of average power in 42 fs pulses 16 at 3.25 and 3.1 µm, respectively. Based on our tests on a smallscale 100-kHz, 1.5/3.2-µm OPA system, we found that KTA booster amplifiers vastly outperform periodically-poled LiNbO3-based OPA's even at low average powers.…”

Progress in ultrafast, mid-infrared optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers pumped at 1 µm

“…All our measurements were conducted at two repetition rates: (i) 100 Hz to avoid thermo-optic effects and (ii) 100 kHz to mimic the conditions of the MIR OPA's. To include possible cascaded  (2) :  (2) effects the way they may occur in an OPA, all crystals were cut for optical parametric amplification at a pump wavelength of 1 µm. Further details about the z-scan setup are provided elsewhere.…”

“…In the 1.4-4 µm wavelength region, where a number of wide-bandgap oxide nonlinear optical crystals are commercially available, multi-GW peak powers at average powers well above 10 W have already been demonstrated with pulses lasting only a few optical cycles. Most of the demonstrated high-power OPA systems relied on bulk, critically phase-matched crystals for power scaling, [1][2][3][4] such as KNbO3, LiNbO3, and KTiOAsO4 (KTA), while only one utilized periodically poled LiNbO3 (PPLN) for this purpose. 5 Due to the lack of suitable nonlinear crystals, ultrafast optical parametric devices operating beyond 5 µm were based almost exclusively on an OPA followed by difference frequency generation (DFG) at an overall pump-to-MIR energy conversion efficiency below 1% at 8 µm.…”

Programmable pulse shaping for time-gated amplifiers

“…An alternative to the SLM-based pulse shaper is an acousto-optic programmable dispersive filter (AOPDF) [9]. AOPDFs are used in chirped pulse amplification (CPA) systems because they do not generate pulse replicas [10], and they can apply a large spectral phase while also controlling the spectral amplitude [11][12][13]. However, AOPDFs can be operated at a limited repetition rate and diffraction efficiency due to the need to continually generate new acoustic waves to modulate the acousto-optic crystal at the laser repetition rate.…”

“…However, AOPDFs can be operated at a limited repetition rate and diffraction efficiency due to the need to continually generate new acoustic waves to modulate the acousto-optic crystal at the laser repetition rate. Currently, the highest repetition rate AOPDF-controlled system was demonstrated at 100 kHz [13].…”