Few-cycle fs-pumped NOPA with passive ultrabroadband spectral shaping.

A compact, femtosecond-pumped noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA) is presented with a passive spectral shaping technique, employed to produce a flat-top-like ultrabroadband output spectrum. The NOPA is pumped by a dedicated 2 mJ, 120 fs Yb-based CPA system, which generates both the second harmonic pump pulse and white light supercontinuum as the signal pulse. A chirped mirror pair pre-compensates the material GVD within the optical path of the signal pulse to produce a near-FTL pulse duration at the OPA crystal output.

Intracavity stretcher for chirped-pulse amplification in high-power laser systems.

We present pulse stretching with an intracavity Offner-type pulse stretcher applied to a high-energy, short-pulse laser system. The compact intracavity design, offering a tunable stretching factor, allows the pulses to be stretched to several nanoseconds and, at the same time, to be amplified to 100 μJ. The stretched pulses have been further amplified with the high-power laser system Polaris and have been recompressed to durations as short as 102 fs, reaching peak powers of 100 TW.

54 J pulses with 18 nm bandwidth from a diode-pumped chirped-pulse amplification laser system.

We report on results from the fully diode-pumped chirped-pulse amplification laser system Polaris. Pulses were amplified to a maximum energy of 54.2 J before compression.

High contrast, 86 fs, 35 mJ pulses from a diode-pumped, Yb:glass, double-chirped-pulse amplification laser system.

We demonstrate the generation of 86 fs, 35 mJ, high-contrast laser pulses at 1030 nm with a repetition rate of 1 Hz from a diode-pumped double chirped-pulse amplification setup. The pulses exhibit a spectral bandwidth exceeding 27 nm full width at half-maximum. This could be achieved by using a laser architecture comprising two stages of chirped pulse amplification with a cross-polarized wave generation filter in between, by applying spectral shaping and by increasing the spectral hard-clip of the second stretcher.

Ultra-high contrast frontend for high peak power fs-lasers at 1030 nm.

We present the results from a new frontend within a double-chirped pulse amplification architecture (DCPA) utilizing crossed-polarized wave generation (XPW) for generating ultra-high contrast, 150 μJ-level, femtosecond seed pulses at 1030 nm. These pulses are used in the high energy class diode-pumped laser system Polaris at the Helmholtz Institute in Jena. Within this frontend, laser pulses from a 75 MHz oscillator-pulse train are extracted at a repetition rate of 1 Hz, temporally stretched, amplified and then recompressed reaching a pulse energy of 2 mJ, a bandwidth of 12 nm and 112 fs pulse duration at a center wavelength of 1030 nm.

16.6 J chirped femtosecond laser pulses from a diode-pumped Yb:CaF2 amplifier.

We report the amplification of laser pulses at a center wavelength of 1034 nm to an energy of 16.6 J from a fully diode-pumped amplifier using Yb:CaF2 as the active medium. Pumped by a total optical power of 300 kW from high-power laser diodes, a gain factor of g=6.

High-intensity, high-contrast laser pulses generated from the fully diode-pumped Yb:glass laser system POLARIS.

We report on the first generation of high-contrast, 164 fs duration pulses from the laser system POLARIS reaching focused peak intensities in excess of 2×10(20) W/cm2. To our knowledge, this is the highest peak intensity reported so far that has been achieved with a diode-pumped, solid-state laser. Several passive contrast enhancement techniques have been specially developed and implemented, achieving a relative prepulse intensity smaller than 10(-8) at t=-30 ps before the main pulse.