High-contrast optical-parametric amplifier as a front end of high-power laser systems

Abstract

A high-contrast preamplifier based on optical-parametric amplification with a short pump pulse is demonstrated. A gain larger than 10(5) and measurement-limited contrast higher than 10(11) are obtained over a large temporal range extending within less than 10 ps of the peak of the pulse, because of the high instantaneous parametric gain provided by a short pump pulse in a nonlinear crystal. The energy gain and high contrast of this preamplifier make it a good seed source for high-power laser systems.

Carrier-envelope phase stabilized high temporal contrast femtosecond laser source at 1053 nm

“…The results achieved are shown in figure 3. From the results we can see that the temporal contrast ratio is improved from ∼10 8 to the detection limitation ∼10 11 and the temporal contrast ratio reaches >10 11 at 2 ps before the main pulse, which is better than the results obtained by the pure OPA process [10]. The prepulse near −1.5 ps is introduced by the device itself.…”

“…Due to the development of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) and the following optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) technologies, the output peak power of the ultra-intense and ultrashort laser has been beyond the PW (10 15 W) level [1][2][3], and the further EW (10 18 W), and even the ZW (10 21 W) laser has been predicted with combination of the coherent beams for higher intensity [4,5]. Therefore, physical research can be carried out using these ultrahigh powerful lasers in such areas as particle acceleration, nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED) and others [6,7].…”

“…Further, the PW-level Nd:glass based CPA laser system with a higher temporal contrast ratio is still significant for fast ignition. A series of pulse cleaning techniques, such as some OPA schemes at 1053 nm have been used in high power Nd:glass CPA laser systems, but the temporal contrast decreases remarkably within ∼10 ps before the main pulse and carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stability is not considered in previous work [10].…”

Accelerating ions with high-energy short laser pulses from submicrometer thick targets

“…A second CPA stage is then used to further amplify the pulse to its maximum energy. At the PHELIX system we apply another technique first proposed by Dorrer [22] . The high-energy seed pulse is generated by directly amplifying the short pulse from the oscillator using an ultrafast optical parametric amplifier (uOPA) [15] .…”

High-repetition-rate picosecond pump laser based on an Yb:YAG disk amplifier for optical parametric amplification

“…Stretching the seed pulse to a significant fraction of the pump pulse duration is required for efficient energy extraction, but extensive stretching to tens of picoseconds introduces high losses to the seed energy and requires highly dispersive prisms or grating components and subsequently intricate adaptive dispersion management schemes for proper recompression [21,22]. The use of shorter pump pulses in the range of a few picoseconds [23] would eliminate the need for such a large stretching and compression ratio. In this case, the seed pulse can be stretched by passing it through a few-centimeter-long dispersive optical material and recompressed by a highly-efficient compressor made up of a few chirped multilayer mirrors [24].…”