A cavity mode size adjustable high average power Ti: sapphire femtosecond regenerative amplifier

Abstract

High average power femtosecond lasers based on Ti:sapphire are widely used in strong-field physics and ultrafast dynamics.Continued advances include isolated attosecond pulse generation,few-cycle pulse generation,ultrafast spectroscopy,time-resolved photo-chemical reaction dynamics and laser micro-machining benefit greatly from use of such laser systems.The regenerative amplifiers are mostly utilized and have inherent advantages over multipass ones for applications in chirped pulse amplification.In this paper we describe a design,performance,and the characterizations of a novel linear cavity regenerative amplifier which has produced 4.8 W average power with 35 fs pulse durations at 1 kHz repetition rate. The main difficulty in designing and constructing a high average power Ti:sapphire regenerative cavity is thermal lensing effect.In order to generate amplified pulses with an output power exceeding 5 W at 1 kHz,a green pump power higher than 20 W is required.Meanwhile,the focal pump beam diameter on the surface of Ti:sapphire crystal should have sub-millimeter mode size to demonstrate large pump fluence,inducing a focal length of a thermal lens about 100 mm,i.e.,which is much less than the scale of the cavity length.For our experiments,a cavity mode size adjustable geometry is employed to counteract thermal lensing effect and to optimize the conversion efficiency of the amplifier.We first characterize the cavity stability by applying the well-known ABCD matrix formalism.The cavity consisting of R=900 mm concave mirror,an 2=800 mm lens and a plane mirror has two stability ranges with increasing the focal length of the thermal lens.In order to obtain a highest thermal tolerance,the optimal cavity parameters are resolved when two stability zones merge into one.After characterizing the cavity in detail,we calculate the cavity mode and the pump beam size at the position of the Ti:sapphire rod as a function of the thermal focal length.The optimal mode radius occurs at 312 m,corresponding to the intersection point of two curves.Stability curve exhibits a weak thermal sensitivity which is defined as the change of radius of cavity mode size per unit focal power change of thermal lens, keeping well below 10 m/D in a range of 2 D-4 D.The calculated results show that the active compensation for thermal lens focal length from 100 mm to could be achieved by adjusting the lens position,without changing the cavity. 20 fs,3 nJ pulses at a repetition rate of 82 MHz produced by a home-made Kerr-lens mode-locked oscillator are first sent to a Martinez stretcher by using a 1200 lines/mm holographic reflectance grating,which temporally stretches the laser pulses to 200 ps.The seed pulses out of the stretcher is then injected into the regenerative cavity depicted above. The 20 mJ pumping energy at 1 kHz is focused through the R=900 mm concave mirror into a 10 mm Brewster-cut Ti:sapphire rod,which is cooled to 250 K by thermoelectric elements.Condensation was avoided by placing the crystal into a small evacuated chamber.Mode matchings of pump and laser beam are found to be of critical importance for high energy extraction efficiency and high beam quality.In our experiments it is accomplished by fine adjusting the F=800 mm cavity lens and the pump beam size.The amplified power of 6.5 W at 1 kHz is obtained with minimum beam distortion,giving a 33.6% slope efficiency.The trapped pulse is built-up quickly and saturated after 8-round trips. The beam size of the amplified laser is expanded to 15 mm in diameter before compressor.A transmission efficiency of 73.8% is achieved through the grating-pair Treacy-type compressor,leading to a 4.8 mJ pulse energy.The grating has a groove density of 1500 lines/mm,and the compressed output spectrum has a full width at half maximum of 29 nm. The pulse duration measurement is performed by using an interferometric autocorrelation.As a result,a typical autocorrelation trace corresponding to a 35 fs pulse width is displayed,and agrees well with the 32 fs transform limit.The far-field beam profile after the compressor is round and Gaussian in both s and p planes,respectively.This scheme is also sufficiently reliable and robust so that no components of the laser system were damaged over a year of operation. In summary,the theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the regenerative cavity developed in this work exhibits a high conversion efficiency and an extraordinary thermal stability,and it is very suitable for high power and high efficient amplification of femtosecond Ti:sapphire pulses.