High-energy mid-infrared femtosecond pulses at 3.3 μm directly generated by dual-chirped optical parametric amplification

Yuxi Fu,Katsumi Midorikawa,Akira Suda,Bing Xue,Takahashi Eiji J,Kotaro Nishimura,G Cerullo,M Khalil,F Kärtner,R Li,J Ogilvie

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201920501008

Abstract

By employing a dual-chirped optical parametric amplification (DC-OPA) using MgO:LiNbO3 crystals, we generate 31 mJ mid-infrared (MIR) pulses at 3.3 um with a repetition rate of 10 Hz. After passing through a CaF2 bulk compressor which has 70% throughput efficiency, these MIR pulses are compressed to 70 fs (6.3 optical cycles), which is close to the transform-limited duration of 66 fs. Thus, the peak power is evaluated to be 0.3 TW. Our results present notable progress in the generation of high-energy MIR pulses and prove that DC-OPA is a superior method for efficiently generating MIR pulses with few-cycle duration and TW-class peak power.

Highlights

There is rapidly growing interest in shifting the ultrafast laser wavelength used for strong-field physics research from the widely employed NIR region (~ 0.8 μm) to the mid-infrared (MIR) region owing to its various advantages, for example, obtaining the current record pulse duration of 43 as [1] in soft x-ray region and 53 as [2] in water window region using MIR pulses which help to extend photon energy and reducing atto-chirp in high-order harmonic generation (HHG)
High pulse energy of MIR fs laser is significant for energy scaling of coherent light source in the sub-keV photon energy region by HHG [3]
We experimentally demonstrate the generation of TW-class MIR pulses using MgO:LiNbO3 crystals based dualchirped optical parametric amplification (DC-OPA)

Summary

Introduction

There is rapidly growing interest in shifting the ultrafast laser wavelength used for strong-field physics research from the widely employed NIR region (~ 0.8 μm) to the mid-infrared (MIR) region owing to its various advantages, for example, obtaining the current record pulse duration of 43 as [1] in soft x-ray region and 53 as [2] in water window region using MIR pulses which help to extend photon energy and reducing atto-chirp in high-order harmonic generation (HHG). High pulse energy of MIR fs laser is significant for energy scaling of coherent light source in the sub-keV photon energy region by HHG [3]. DCOPA was proved to have an excellent energy scaling ability and obtained 100 mJ class IR fs pulses in the 1–2 μm wavelength range for the first time [8].

Results

Conclusion