High-power pre-chirp managed amplification of circularly polarized pulses using high-dispersion chirped mirrors as a compressor

Abstract

We incorporate two techniques into pre-chirp managed amplification (PCMA) to achieve high-energy ultrashort pulses with the duration well below 100 fs. Numerical simulations confirmed by our experimental results demonstrate that seeding PCMA with circularly polarized pulses instead of linearly polarized pulses can increase the amplified pulse energy by 1.5 times. We also employ high-dispersion chirped mirrors to compress the amplified pulses with the throughput efficiency as high as 98%. These two techniques allow us to demonstrate an Yb-fiber PCMA system that emits 50-MHz, 47-fs pulses with 101.2-W average power.