2.4-Joule chirped pulse operation by a laser-diode-pumped slab laser for pumping non-collinear OPCPA

Abstract

We present a diode-pumped chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system that generates multi-joule energy at a central wavelength of 1054 nm at a repetition rate of 10 Hz. The purpose of this laser is to serve as a pump source for non-collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (NOPCPA). A Nd-doped glass slab with zigzag optical path was used as the gain medium of the main amplifier in this system to obtain multi-joule output with repeatable operation. The Nd:glass zigzag slab amplifier system consists of four-pass pre-amplification and four-pass power amplification. The seed pulse that is fed to the main amplifier was generated by a mode-locked fiber oscillator emitting at a 1053 nm central wavelength. The oscillator output was pulse-stretched to 2.7 ns duration with a 4.5 nm spectral bandwidth and amplified to 100 μJ by optical parametric amplification by use of type-I BBO crystals. After the main amplification, 2.4 J of energy in 3.7 nm of spectral bandwidth at 1 Hz repetition rate was obtained. This spectral bandwidth corresponds to a transform-limited pulse duration of 440 fs. This result indicates that our CPA laser is capable of delivering multi-joule pump light after pulse compression and frequency doubling for 30-TW NOPCPA system.