Ultrafast Mid-IR Laser Pulses Generation via Chirp Manipulated Optical Parametric Amplification

Abstract

Abstract:Over the past decades, optical parametric amplification (OPA) has become one of the most promising sources of ultrafast Mid-IR laser, owing to its outstanding properties including ultrabroad bandwidth, superior tunability, good beam quality, and scalable energy. In this paper, we review the recent progress in ultrashort laser pulse generation via chirp manipulated OPA, which improves the energy scalability and gain bandwidth by strategically chirping both pump and seed pulses. The gain mechanism is theoretically analyzed and the OPA processes are numerically simulated. In addition, the concept is verified experimentally. Femtosecond pulses with hundreds of mJ are generated in a high energy dual-chirped-OPA (DC-OPA), and ultrabroadband µJ-level spectra supporting sub-2-cycle pulse durations are achieved in BBP-OPA. Furthermore, the obtained pulses show excellent tunability through the NIR to Mid-IR regions, which makes them a suitable seeding source for further amplification as well as powerful tools in various applications such as strong field physics, attosecond science, and ultrafast spectroscopy.

Infrared spectroscopic monitoring of solid-state processes

“…[50][51][52] IR spectroscopic insight to even faster phenomena, which occur at the femtosecond time scale, are enabled by the recent development of advanced laser pump-probe methodologies. [53][54][55][56][57] The range of mid-IR electromagnetic waves covers the B10-300 fs region, which defines the limit of time resolution that can be achieved by IR spectroscopy.…”

Dispersion‐Engineered Super‐Gain Parametric Amplification in Nanoscale Optical Cavities

“…However, even an artificial material/structure with an unusually high nonlinearity is unlikely to provide high-gain OPA in the nanoscale for all the frequencies at a desired bandwidth without the maximization of the gain-bandwidth product through dispersion engineering. [2,4,[6][7][8][9] Hence, nanoscale OPA still remains a big challenge. In this article, it will be shown that the gain-bandwidth product of the OPA process can be drastically enhanced at the nanoscale through computational dispersion engineering.…”

Spectral broadening for pulse compression using liquid alcohols

“…Ultrashort laser pulses also play a large role in measuring the nonlinear response of materials to high intensity pulses. Ultrafast technologies have been used in a wide variety of applications, including pulse compression techniques for few-cycles pulses via self-phase modulation (SPM) [1][2][3], Kerr instability amplification [4,5], and generation of ultrashort pulses in the infrared (IR) and terahertz (THz) regimes [6][7][8]. Femtosecond pulse durations also allow for the investigation of processes that occur on femtosecond to attosecond (1 as = 10 −18 s) time scales, such as high harmonic generation [9,10] and femtosecond [11,12] and attosecond pump-probe experiments [13].…”