Replacing Ti:sapphire regenerative ampliflers with an optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier

Summary form only given. Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) offers several advantages when compared to regenerative chirped pulse amplification using Ti:sapphire or Cr:LiSAF. These advantages include low cumulative nonlinear phase (B-integral), greater wavelength flexibility, and high gain achieved without the use of gated electro-optic modulators and multipass amplification. High-energy OPCPA systems pumped by large aperture, low repetition rate glass laser systems have produced up to 0.5 J of amplified stretched pulses, subsequently recompressed to 300 fs. However, OPCPA using commercially available Q-switched pump lasers have, to date, only produced 600 /spl mu/J of amplified signal with a pump-to-signal conversion efficiency near 0.3 %. This low efficiency limits the attractiveness of OPCPA to facilities with high energy, shorter pulse pump lasers. We report chirped pulse amplification of broadband 1054 nm pulses to 31 mJ by single passing only 40 mm of gain material pumped by a commercial Q-switched laser, with a pump to signal conversion efficiency of 6%.