High contrast few-cycle frontend with hybrid amplification for petawatt-class lasers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-contrast, few-cycle laser frontend with hybrid amplification, enabling stable, ultrashort pulses suitable for petawatt-class lasers at high repetition rates.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid amplification architecture combining femtosecond optical parametric and Ti:Sa-based amplification for high-energy, high-contrast laser seeding.

Findings

Achieved 13 mJ pulse energy at 14.4 fs duration.

Pulse contrast exceeds 10^12 15 ps before the main pulse.

Demonstrated stable operation at 100 Hz repetition rate.

Abstract

We present a 10 mJ-class laser system for seeding petawatt-class Ti:Sa lasers based on a hybrid, femtosecond optical parametric and negatively chirped Ti:Sa-based amplification architecture. Output pulses with 13 mJ energy, 14.4 fs transform limited duration, and high spatio-spectral quality are reached at 100 Hz repetition rate centered at 788 nm wavelength. By compressing 1 mJ energy with bulk glass and positively chirped mirrors, a pulse duration of 15.5 fs is measured. The intensity contrast is higher than 10$^{12}$ already 15 ps before the main pulse. The presented architecture can be a robust and reliable solution for seeding sub-17 fs high intensity lasers with ultrahigh contrast at up to 100 Hz repetition rate.