Abstract
Abstract This study develops a Yb:KGW dual-crystal based regenerative amplifier. The thermal lensing and gain-narrowing effects are compensated by the dual-crystal configuration. Sub-nanojoule pulses are amplified to 1.5 mJ with 9 nm spectral bandwidth and 1 kHz repetition rate using chirped pulse amplification technology. Consequently, 1.2 mJ pulses with a pulse duration of 227 fs are obtained after compression. Thanks to the cavity design, the output laser was a near diffraction limited beam with M2 around 1.1. The amplifier has the potential to boost energy above 2 mJ after compression and act as a front end for a future kilohertz terawatt-class diode-pumped Yb:KGW laser system.
Highlights
Ultra-intense, ultrafast lasers[1] are widely used in strong field physics, such as laser wakefield acceleration[2, 3], high harmonic generation[4, 5] and terahertz radiation[6]
These lasers are currently generated from a Ti:sapphire-based chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system[7,8,9] or nonlinear crystal-based optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) system[10,11,12]
We propose a kilohertz ultra-intense, ultra-short Yb:KGW-based CPA system, called the Kilohertz Ultraintense ultrAshort Functional laser Unit (KUAFU)
Summary
Ultra-intense, ultrafast lasers[1] are widely used in strong field physics, such as laser wakefield acceleration[2, 3], high harmonic generation[4, 5] and terahertz radiation[6]. Ytterbium-doped lasers have been developed to exhibit high pulse energy and power[13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. The Petawatt Energy Efficient Laser for Optical Plasma Experiments (PENELOPE) project with designed parameters of 150 J/150 fs/1 PW/1 Hz based on the Yb:CaF2 crystal amplifier is under development[16]. Based on the Yb:YAG crystal, 1 J pulses with a pulse duration of 5 ps at 0.5 kHz were realized using a cryogenic Yb:YAG active mirror amplifier[17]. We believe that we can further boost the pulse energy to over 2 mJ with new higher-quality dichroic mirrors and by further stretching the chirped pulse duration
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