This paper presents the optimization of a dual-chirped optical parametric amplification (DC-OPA) scheme for producing an ultrafast intense infrared (IR) pulse. By employing a total energy of 0.77 J Ti:sapphire pump laser and type-I BBO crystals, an IR pulse energy at the center wavelength of 1.7 $μ$m exceeded 0.1 J using the optimized DC-OPA. By adjusting the injected seed spectrum and prism pair compressor with a gross throughput of over 70 \%, the 1.7-$μ$m pulse was compressed to 31 fs, which resulted in a peak power of up to 2.3 TW. Based on the demonstration of the BBO type-I DC-OPA, we propose a novel OPA scheme called the $dual~pump$ DC-OPA for producing a high-energy IR pulse with a two-cycle duration.
Mamyshev oscillator based on gain-managed nonlinearity and chirped pulse amplification
Research Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Dongguan University of Technology（东莞理工学院交叉科学研究院与材料科学与工程学院）；EMGO-TECH Ltd.（恩格科技有限公司）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）；School of Physics, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学物理学院）；Faculty of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, Ningbo University（宁波大学机械工程与力学学院）
We report multicycle, narrowband, terahertz radiation at 14.8 THz produced by phase-matched optical rectification of femtosecond laser pulses in bulk lithium niobate (LiNbO$_3$) crystals. Our experiment and simulation show that the output terahertz energy greatly enhances when the input laser pulse is highly chirped, contrary to a common optical rectification process. We find this abnormal behavior is attributed to a linear electro-optic (or Pockels) effect, in which the laser pulse propagating in LiNbO$_3$ is modulated by the terahertz field it produces, and this in turn drives optical rectif…
Phase-stabilized 12-fs, 1-nJ pulses from a commercial Ti:sapphire oscillator are directly amplified in a chirped-pulse optical parametric amplifier and recompressed to yield near-transform-limited 17.3-fs pulses. The amplification process is demonstrated to be phase preserving and leads to 85-uJ, carrier-envelope-offset phase-locked pulses at 1 kHz for 0.9 mJ of pump, corresponding to a single-pass gain of 8.5 x 10^4.
We present the first carrier-envelope phase stable chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) featuring high temporal contrast for relativistic intensity laser-plasma interactions at 1 kHz repetition rate. The laser is based on a double-CPA architecture including XPW filtering technique and a high-energy grism-based compressor. 8 mJ, 22 fs pulses are produced with 10-11 temporal contrast at -20 ps and a CEP drift of 240 mrad RMS.
Based on the dual-chirped optical parametric amplification and type-I BiB$_3$O$_6$(BiBO) crystals, the generation of $>$100 mJ, 10.4 fs, 10 Hz, carrier-to-envelope phase (CEP)-stable laser pulses, which are centered at 1.7 $μ$m, is demonstrated; it produces a peak power of 10 TW. CEP-dependent high harmonic generation is implemented to confirm the sub-two-cycle pulse duration and CEP stabilization of infrared (IR) laser pulses. As far as we know, the obtained pulse energy and peak power represent the highest values for sub-two-cycle CEP-stable IR optical parametric amplification. Additionally,…
Lasers that generate ultra-intense light pulses are under development for experiments in high-field and high-energy-density physics, as well as for applications such as particle acceleration. Extensions to even higher powers are being considered for future investigations that can only be imagined today, such as the quantum electrodynamics of plasmas and isolated attosecond-pulse generation with solid targets. For all of these areas, it is vital to produce high-contrast pulses, so that no pre-plasma is created in the target before the arrival of the main pulse. However, noise is unavoidable in …
Amplified bursts of laser pulses are sought for various machining, deposition, spectroscopic and strong-field applications. Standard frequency- and time-domain techniques for pulse division become inadequate when intraburst repetition rates reach the terahertz (THz) range as a consequence of inaccessible spectral resolution, requirement for interferometric stability, and collapse of the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) concept due to the loss of usable bandwidth needed for safe temporal stretching. Avoiding the burst amplification challenge and resorting to a lossy post-division of an isolate…
We demonstrate an efficient procedure for terahertz-wave radiation generation by applying a nonlinear wavelength conversion approach using a mid-infrared pump source. We used a 3.3 μm dual-chirped optical parametric amplification source and a 1.5 μm fiber laser for a comparison of energy conversion efficiencies. Nonlinear inorganic and organic crystals were used, and for the periodically-poled lithium niobate crystal, the efficiencies were 1.3*10^-4 and 5.6*10^-12 for the 3.3 μm source and the 1.5 μm source, respectively. We confirmed that nonlinear crystals could be pumped with tera-watt / cm…
Advances of high intensity lasers have opened up the field of strong field physics and led to a broad range of technological applications. Recent x ray laser sources and optics development makes it possible to obtain extremely high intensity and brightness at x ray wavelengths. In this paper, we present a system design that implements chirped pulse amplification for hard x ray free electron lasers. Numerical modeling with realistic experimental parameters show that near-transform-limit single-femtosecond hard x ray laser pulses with peak power exceeding 1 TW and brightness exceeding $4\times10…
The nonlinear pulse propagation in an optical fibers with varying parameters is investigated. The capture of moving in the frequency domain femtosecond colored soliton by a dispersive trap formed in an amplifying fiber makes it possible to accumulate an additional energy and to reduce significantly the soliton pulse duration. Nonlinear dynamics of the chirped soliton pulses in the dispersion managed systems is also investigated. The methodology developed does provide a systematic way to generate infinite ``ocean'' of the chirped soliton solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NSE) wit…
An ultrafast fiber chirped-pulse amplification laser system based on coherent combination of 16 ytterbium-doped rod-type amplifiers is presented. It generates 10 mJ pulse energy at 1 kW average power and 120 fs pulse duration. A partially helium-protected, two-staged chirped-pulse amplification grating compressor is implemented to maintain the close to diffraction-limited beam quality by avoiding nonlinear absorption in air.
Advances in the amplification and manipulation of ultrashort laser pulses has led to revolutions in several areas. Examples include chirped pulse amplification for generating high peak-power lasers, power-scalable amplification techniques, pulse shaping via modulation of spatially-dispersed laser pulses, and efficient frequency-mixing in quasi-phase-matched nonlinear crystals to access new spectral regions. In this work, we introduce and demonstrate a new platform for nonlinear optics which has the potential to combine all of these separate functionalities (pulse amplification, frequency trans…
In this paper we discuss the bandwidth enhancement that can be achieved in multi-Joule optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) systems exploiting the tunability of parametric amplification. In particular, we consider a pair of single pass amplifiers based on potassium dideuterium phosphate (DKDP), pumped by the second harmonic of Nd:glass and tuned to amplify adjacent regions of the signal spectrum. We demonstrate that a bandwidth enhancement up to 50% is possible in two configurations; in the first case, one of the two amplifiers is operated near its non-collinear broadband lim…
We report the amplification of an all-normal dispersion supercontinuum pulse in a Thulium / Holmium co-doped all-fiber chirped pulse amplification system. With a -20 dB bandwidth of more than 300 nm in the range 1800-2100 nm the system delivers high quality 66 fs pulses with more than 70 kW peak power directly from the output fiber. The coherent seeding of the entire emission bandwidth of the doped fiber and the stability of the supercontinuum generation dynamics in the silicate glass all-normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber result in excellent noise characteristics of the amplified ultras…
We describe Ti:Sapphire pumped optical parametric amplification of carrier-envelope phase stabilized few-cycle ($<10$fs) mid-infrared pulses in type I $β$-barium borate. Experimental measurements show a $\times3.5$ amplification factor (from 100$μ$J to 350$μ$J) of the octave spanning spectrum ($1.1-2.4$$μ$m) using a pump beam with 2.3mJ energy, 30fs duration and central wavelength of 800nm, corresponding to an energy extraction efficiency of $11\%$. Numerical simulations suggest potential amplification to 4.25mJ energy and temporal compression to a pulse duration of 7.3fs is possible with a pu…
A new amplification method, weaving the three basic compression techniques, Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) and Plasma Compression by Backward Raman Amplification (BRA) in plasma, is proposed. It is called C3 for Cascaded Conversion Compression. It has the capability to compress with good efficiency kilojoule to megajoule, nanosecond laser pulses into femtosecond pulses, to produce exawatt and beyond peak power. In the future, C3 could be used at large-scale facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) or the Laser Megajoule …
We outline an approach for improving the temporal contrast of a high-intensity laser system by $>$8 orders of magnitude using non-collinear sum-frequency generation with the signal and idler of an optical parametric amplifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique by cleaning pulses from a millijoule-level chirped-pulse amplification system to provide $>$10$^{12}$ intensity contrast relative to all pre-pulses and amplified spontaneous emission $>$5~ps prior to the main pulse. The output maintains percent-level energy stability on the time scales of a typical user experiment at our…
We present a Ho:YLF Chirped-Pulse Amplification (CPA) laser for pumping a longwave infrared Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier (OPCPA) at a 1 kHz repetition rate. By utilizing a Ti:Sapphire laser as a frontend, 5-μJ seed pulses at 2051 nm laser pulse are generated in a Dual-Chirp Optical Parametric Amplifier (DC-OPA), which are amplified to 28 mJ pulses with a pulse duration of 6.8 ps. The scheme offers a potential driver for two-color (800 nm and 8 μm) high harmonic generation with an increased keV X-ray photon flux.
We present a carrier-envelope offset (CEO) stable ytterbium-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplification system employing the technology of coherent beam combining and delivering more than 1 kW of average power at a pulse repetition rate of 80 MHz. The CEO stability of the system is 220 mrad rms, characterized out-of-loop with an f-to-2f interferometer in a frequency offset range of 10 Hz to 20 MHz. The high-power amplification system boosts the average power of the CEO stable oscillator by five orders of magnitude while increasing the phase noise by only 100 mrad. No evidence of CEO noise deterior…
We present a comprehensive model for predicting the full performance of a second harmonic generationoptical parametric amplification system that aims at enhancing the temporal contrast of laser pulses. The model simultaneously takes into account all the main parameters at play in the system such as the group velocity mismatch, the beam divergence, the spectral content, the pump depletion, and the length of the nonlinear crystals. We monitor the influence of the initial parameters of the input pulse and the interdependence of the two related non-linear processes on the performance of the system…
High-energy femtosecond laser pulses in the mid-infrared (MIR) wavelength range are essential for a wide range of applications from strong-field physics to selectively pump and probe low energy excitations in condensed matter and molecular vibrations. Here we report a four stage optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier (OPCPA) which generates ultrashort pulses at a central wavelength of 3000 nm with 430 $μ$J energy per pulse at a bandwidth of 490 nm. Broadband emission of a Ti:sapphire oscillator seeds synchronously the four OPCPA stages at 800 nm and the pump line at 1030 nm. The first stag…
We demonstrate a new regime for mid-infrared optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) based on achromatic quasi-phase-matching. Our mid-infrared OPCPA system is based on collinear aperiodically poled lithium niobate (APPLN) pre-amplifiers and a non-collinear PPLN power amplifier. The idler output has a bandwidth of 800 nm centered at 3.4 $μ$m. After compression, we obtain a pulse duration of 44.2 fs and a pulse energy of 21.8 $μ$J at a repetition rate of 50 kHz. We explain the wide applicability of the non-collinear QPM amplification scheme we used, including how it can enable oc…
Lasers capable of generating attosecond X-ray pulses in the water window (282 to 533 eV) through high-order harmonic generation are normally based on inefficient, multi-stage optical parametric amplifiers or optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers pumped by femtosecond or picosecond lasers. Here we report a very efficient single amplification stage laser based on traditional chirped pulse amplification capable of producing 3 mJ, near-transform limited 44 fs (<6 cycles), 1 kHz pulses centered at 2.5 micrometer. The 68 GW peak power is the highest value ever reached at this wavelength. In or…
We propose a new method for laser pulse compression that uses the spatially varying dispersion of a plasma plume with a density gradient. This novel scheme can be used to compress ultrahigh power lasers. A long, negatively frequency-chirped, laser pulse reflects off the plasma ramp of an over-dense plasma. As the density increases longitudinally the high frequency photons at the leading part of the laser pulse propagates more deeply than low frequency photons, the pulse is compressed in a similar way to compression off a chirped mirror. Proof-of-principle simulations, using a one-dimensional (…
Many experiments in attosecond science will benefit from attosecond pulses at high repetition rates with sufficient photon flux for pump-probe experiments. We use 7fs, 800nm pulses from a non-collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (NOPCPA) laser system to generate few-pulse attosecond pulse trains (APTs) in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) at a repetition rate of 100kHz. The pulse trains have been fully characterized by recording FROG-CRAB (Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating for Complete Reconstruction of Attosecond Bursts) traces with a velocity map imaging spectrometer.
We perform a post-compression of high energy pulses by using optical-field ionization of low pressure helium gas in a guided geometry. We apply this approach to a TW chirped-pulse-amplification based Ti:Sapphire laser chain and show that spectral broadening can be controlled both with the input pulse energy and gas pressure. Under optimized conditions, we generate 10 fs pulses at TW level directly under vacuum and demonstrate a high stability of the post compressed pulse duration. These high energy post-compressed pulses are thereafter used to perform high harmonic generation in a loose focusi…
A carrier envelope phase stable near-single cycle mid-infrared laser based on optical parametric chirped pulse amplification and hollow-core-fiber compression is demonstrated. 4 μm laser pulses with 11.8 mJ energy are delivered from a KTA based OPCPA with 100 Hz repetition rate, and compressed to be ~105 fs by a two-grating compressor with efficiency over 50%. Subsequently, the pulse spectrum is broadened by employing a krypton gas-filled hollow-core-fiber (HCF). Then, the pulse duration is further compressed to 21.5 fs through a CaF2 bulk material with energy of 2.6 mJ and stability of 0.9% R…
We present a high-power source of broadband terahertz radiation covering the whole THz spectral region (0.1-30 THz). The two-color gas plasma generation process is driven by a state-of-the-art Ytterbium fiber chirped pulse amplification system based on coherent combination of 16 rod-type amplifiers. Prior to the THz generation, the pulses are spectrally broadened in a multi-pass-cell and compressed to 37 fs with a pulse-energy of 1.3 mJ at a repetition rate of 500 kHz. A gas-jet scheme has been employed for the THz generation, increasing the efficiency of the process to 0.1%. The air-biased-co…
Self-action nonlinearity is a key aspect -- either as a foundational element or a detrimental factor -- of several optical spectroscopies and photonic devices. Supercontinuum generation, wavelength converters and chirped pulse amplification are just a few examples. The recent advent of Free Electron Lasers (FEL) fostered building on nonlinearity to propose new concepts and extend optical wavelengths paradigms for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray regimes. No evidence for intrapulse dynamics, however, has been reported at such short wavelengths, where the light-matter interactions are ruled b…
