Simple and efficient 2-TW Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier

Author

Pawel Wnuk;Yuriy Stepanenko;Czeslaw Radzwicz

Author_Institution

Institute of Experimental Physics, Warsaw University, Ho?a 69, 00-681 Warsaw, Poland

fYear

2009

fDate

6/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

1

Abstract

In this paper, a simple and efficient 2-TW peak power Non-collinear Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier (NOPCPA) pumped by a commercial frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser is presented. As a source of seed pulses we used a home made Ti:Sapphire oscillator with 100 nm bandwidth. The pulses were stretched to 1 ns in a stretcher of Martinez configuration. The stretcher introduced significant temporal aberrations which were compensated in a separate pulse shaper equipped with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator. The pulses were amplified in two stages: preamplifier and power amplifier. The overall efficiency of the system was approx. 10% - the highest value for such a system reported so far. Power stability of 2% RMS was obtained, limited mainly by pump beam energy fluctuations.

Keywords

"Pulse amplifiers","Nonlinear optics","Stimulated emission","Chirp","Optical pulses","Semiconductor optical amplifiers","Optical amplifiers","Optical harmonic generation","Optical pumping","Optical pulse shaping"

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Lasers and Electro-Optics 2009 and the European Quantum Electronics Conference. CLEO Europe - EQEC 2009. European Conference on

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4079-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CLEOE-EQEC.2009.5196438

Filename

5196438