We report 190-mJ pulses with spectral content supporting sub-ps pulse-duration at a 10 Hz repetition rate generated by a cryogenically-cooled, bulk Yb:YLF laser amplifier system. The amplifier system relies on a chirped pulse amplification architecture and consists of a fiber front-end, a regenerative amplifier, and two 4-pass amplifiers. The fiber front-end delivers 15-nJ, 1-ns stretched seed pulses, which are first amplified to 13-mJ pulse energy inside a Yb:YLF regenerative amplifier. Then the pulses are boosted further to 115 mJ and 190 mJ in two consecutive 4-pass amplifiers. To our knowledge, these are the highest pulse energies reported from Yb:YLF based amplifiers to date. We foresee shortening the pulsewidths to sub-400-fs range in future studies.
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