Spatio-spectral couplings in optical parametric amplifiers.

Optical parametric amplification (OPA) is a powerful tool for the generation of ultrashort light pulses. However, under certain circumstances, it develops spatio-spectral couplings, color dependent aberrations that degrade the pulse properties. In this work, we present a spatio-spectral coupling generated by a non-collimated pump beam and resulting in the change of direction of the amplified signal with respect to the input seed.

Saturation control of an optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier.

Optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) is a light amplification technique that provides the combination of broad spectral gain bandwidth and large energy, directly supporting few-cycle pulses with multi-terawatt (TW) peak powers. Saturation in an OPCPA increases the stability and conversion efficiency of the system. However, distinct spectral components experience different gain and do not saturate under the same conditions, which reduces performance.

Dispersion control for temporal contrast optimization.

We investigate the temporal contrast of the Light Wave Synthesizer 20 (LWS-20): a powerful, few-cycle source based on the optical parametric synthesizer principle. Saturation effects in the RF amplifier driving the acousto-optic programmable dispersive filter (AOPDF) were found to degrade the coherent contrast for non-monotonic group delay corrections. We subsequently present a new dispersion scheme and design a novel transmission grism-based stretcher optimized for LWS-20.