Sub-20-fs terawatt-class laser system with a mirrorless regenerative amplifier and an adaptive phase controller.

We have developed an ultrabroadband regenerative amplifier with a mirrorless cavity to eliminate the limitation of bandwidth of dielectric coats on cavity mirrors. The large amount of material dispersion in the Pellin-Broca prisms that are used instead of cavity mirrors is compensated for with a hybrid technique that uses Brewster prism pairs in the regenerative amplifier and an adaptive phase controller of a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator. We obtained a 16-fs pulse width with an energy of 13 mJ, which is to our knowledge the highest energy obtained in the sub-20-fs regime by use of an adaptive phase controller.