Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) is currently one of the leading techniques for the generation of ultra-powerful laser pulses, from the multi-terawatt to the petawatt range, with extremely high peak intensities. A properly designed OPCPA setup is able to provide gain over bandwidths extending hundreds of nanometers in the visible and near-infrared, allowing the generation of high-quality, energetic, few-cycle pulses. In this paper we describe the design and performance of a compact laser amplifier that makes use of noncollinear, ultrabroadband amplification in the nonlinear crystal yttrium-calcium oxyborate (YCOB). The pump and the supercontinuum seed pulses are generated from a common diode-pumped amplifier, ensuring their optical synchronization. This laser will be used as a source of ultrashort (~20 fs), energetic (~20 mJ), tunable pulses in the near infrared.
We characterize ultrabroadband white-light continuum generated in a 10 mm block of bulk sapphire pumped by ~280 fs,
~ 1 mJ laser pulses at 1053 nm. This results in a smooth and stable spectrum, extending at least from 400 to 1100 nm.
The white-light continuum is characterized by using the technique of cross-correlation frequency resolved optical gating
(XFROG). We used a high pass filter to minimize the effect of the spectral components above 1000 nm of the continuum
spectrum in order to avoid experimental artifacts caused by the intense 1053 nm peak, and we observed good agreement
between the retrieved and directly measured spectra.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.