Jitter-compensated Yb:YAG thin-disc laser as a pump for the broadband OPCPA front-end of the ELI-Beamlines system

Roman Antipenkov; Jonathan T. Green; František Batysta; Jack Naylon; Charalampos Zervos; Jakub Novak; Pavel Bakule; Bedrich Rus

doi:10.1117/12.2039751

28 February 2014 Jitter-compensated Yb:YAG thin-disc laser as a pump for the broadband OPCPA front-end of the ELI-Beamlines system

Roman Antipenkov, Jonathan T. Green, František Batysta, Jack Naylon, Charalampos Zervos, Jakub Novak, Pavel Bakule, Bedrich Rus

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8959, Solid State Lasers XXIII: Technology and Devices; 895917 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2039751
Event: SPIE LASE, 2014, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

We report on a temporal jitter-compensated Yb:YAG thin-disc laser as a pump source for the front-end OPCPA of ELIBeamlines high energy and repetition rate system. The main advantage of using picosecond Yb:YAG thin-disc lasers is that relatively high energies in the kHz repetition rate range can be easily accessed. Although in our case the pump laser is optically synchronized to the OPCPA seeding Ti:Sapph laser, the stability of the OPCPA output gets heavily affected by delay jitter due to a large number of roundtrips in the regenerative amplifier cavity and slight ambient temperature drifts. Since interacting pulses are only ~1.5 ps in duration, an additional active stabilization of the pump path length corresponding to sub-100 fs delay precision must be implemented. In our work we demonstrate a novel design of a jitter stabilization system which employs a cross-correlation setup employing parametric amplification in two perpendicularly oriented nonlinear crystals. A small fraction of the OPCPA seed signal is being locked between cross-polarized and delayed replicas of a pump pulse. The feedback signal for the delay compensation is acquired by coupling the polarization-separated parts of the parametrically amplified signal into two channels of a balanced photodetector. The delay stabilization is achieved mainly by adjusting the cavity length of the regenerative amplifier with a piezo-mounted mirror. The proposed setup allows reducing the temporal jitter of Yb:YAG thin-disc regenerative amplifier to tens of fs RMS and maintaining it over extended periods of time.

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Roman Antipenkov, Jonathan T. Green, František Batysta, Jack Naylon, Charalampos Zervos, Jakub Novak, Pavel Bakule, and Bedrich Rus "Jitter-compensated Yb:YAG thin-disc laser as a pump for the broadband OPCPA front-end of the ELI-Beamlines system", Proc. SPIE 8959, Solid State Lasers XXIII: Technology and Devices, 895917 (28 February 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2039751

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