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Ultrafast Terahertz sources with high average power are of increasing interest for various spectroscopic investigations, currently limited by signal-to-noise ratio. A straightforward path to increase the average power of THz sources is to make use of state-of-the-art femtosecond near infrared driving lasers with higher average power than the commonly used Ti:Sa lasers. Diode pumped solid state lasers based on Yb now reliably provide from hundreds of watts up to kilowatts of average power with sub-ps pulses, while THz generation with more than a few tens of watts driving power remains widely unexplored. Among these technologies, modelocked thin-disk oscillators are particularly attractive to drive high power, high repetition rate THz sources, providing hundreds of watts directly from a compact one-box oscillator without the need for any additional amplification stages, thereby reducing the overall system complexity.
Here, we will present our recent results using optical rectification (OR) in GaP and Lithium Niobate (LN), driven by a home-built Yb:YAG femtosecond modelocked thin-disk oscillator with an average power of more than 100 W at 13 MHz repetition rate. Using GaP, we achieve milliwatt average power levels with a bandwidth extending > 6 THz making this an ideal tool for THz-TDS for example of absorptive samples. Using the tilted pulse front scheme in LN, we achieve THz powers exceeding 40 mW at 13 MHz repetition rate, which represents the highest average power of any THz sources with MHz repetition rate. Additionally to these results, we will present our ongoing investigation of thermal effects and further average power scaling of OR in this unusual excitation regime.
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