Abstract
The cascaded dual-chirped optical parametric amplification (DC-OPA) is presented for efficient generation of few-cycle infrared (IR) laser pulses. The input pulses are strategically chirped to optimize the phase-matching bandwidth in each nonlinear crystal, and four regions of the signal spectrum are amplified in cascaded crystals with different cutting angles, enabling flexible manipulation of the output spectrum. Broadband gain and high conversion efficiency are simultaneously achieved owing to the cascaded-crystal arrangement, the signal pulse duration of 4.2 cycles is obtained with 11.7-mJ pulse energy, corresponding to a conversion efficiency of 39.0%. The proposed scheme offers a robust and simple approach to pushing the phase-matching bandwidth limits introduced by the nonlinear crystal, which manifests great prospect in various researches involving ultrafast optics and strong-field physics.
Highlights
Spectrum-Manipulated Few-CycleDuring the past decades, femtosecond laser with the pulse duration down to few optical cycles has become a workhorse in a wide range of applications, the superb temporal resolution accompanied with ultrahigh peak intensity provides unprecedented condition in numerous laser-matter interaction researches such as time-resolved spectroscopy, strong-field physics, fs-laser direct writing, and nonlinear optics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
For both the pump and seed pulses in dual-chirped optical parametric amplification (DC-optical parametric amplification (OPA)), different frequency components appear at different time delays, the synchronization condition between their instantaneous wavelengths follow a pattern defined by the dispersions of each pulse
Proposeand and numerically cascaded scheme wewepropose numerically investigate investigatethethe cascaded for efficiently generating few-cycle laserlaser pulses
Summary
Spectrum-Manipulated Few-CycleDuring the past decades, femtosecond (fs) laser with the pulse duration down to few optical cycles has become a workhorse in a wide range of applications, the superb temporal resolution accompanied with ultrahigh peak intensity provides unprecedented condition in numerous laser-matter interaction researches such as time-resolved spectroscopy, strong-field physics, fs-laser direct writing, and nonlinear optics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Owing to the intriguing properties including ultrabroad bandwidth, high single-pass gain, and broadband tunability, optical parametric amplification (OPA) and optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) have been widely employed to down-convert the commercially available fs laser for generating ultrashort pulses in the near-infrared (NIR) to mid-infrared (mid-IR) regions [8,9,10,11]. In order to achieve ultrabroad spectral bandwidth and produce few-cycle pulses in OPA, multiple efforts have been made to overcome the restriction on the phase-matching (PM) bandwidth of a nonlinear crystal. Rather than amplification in the temporal domain, the frequency-domain OPA (FOPA) presents an innovative design to amplify slices of the broadband signal individually in different crystals by projecting the amplified spectrum onto the Fourier plane [14,15]. Despite the capability of combining several spectral regions for an outstanding output bandwidth, the implementation of either
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