Hybrid chirped pulse amplification

Summary form only given. Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) is an attractive short pulse amplification technology because of its simplicity broad bandwidth and large gain. Pulses from a mode-locked oscillator can be amplified to mJ energies in a single pass of only 2 or 3 nonlinear crystals. Furthermore, OPCPA does not intrinsically produce pre-pulses and does not require electrooptic switching to either select a single pulse from an oscillator pulse train prior to multipass amplification or to inject/eject a pulse from a regenerative amplifier. The major drawback of OPCPA, however, is pump conversion efficiency. The spatio-temporal evolution and relatively long pulse width of commercial Q-switched lasers limits conversion. On the other hand, pump to IR conversion efficiencies of >50% or 90% of the maximum theoretical quantum efficiency have been demonstrated from chirped-pulse, Ti:sapphire amplifiers pumped by commercial Nd:YAG lasers. We present here the first demonstration of a simple hybrid chirped pulse amplification scheme which combines the best of both technologies.