Abstract
We report on the generation of high energy femtosecond pulses at 1 MHz repetition rate from a fiber laser pumped optical parametric amplifier (OPA). Nonlinear bandwidth enhancement in fibers provides the intrinsically synchronized signal for the parametric amplifier. We demonstrate large tunability extending from 700 nm to 1500 nm of femtosecond pulses with pulse energies as high as 1.2 muJ when the OPA is seeded by a supercontinuum generated in a photonic crystal fiber. Broadband amplification over more than 85 nm is achieved at a fixed wavelength. Subsequent compression in a prism sequence resulted in 46 fs pulses. With an average power of 0.5 W these pulses have a peak-power above 10 MW. In particular, the average power and pulse energy scalability of both involved concepts, the fiber laser and the parametric amplifier, will enable easy up-scaling to higher powers.
Highlights
Sources of tunable ultrashort laser pulses are essential tools for probing fast phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology
We report on the generation of high energy femtosecond pulses at 1 MHz repetition rate from a fiber laser pumped optical parametric amplifier (OPA)
We demonstrate large tunability extending from 700 nm to 1500 nm of femtosecond pulses with pulse energies as high as 1.2 μJ when the OPA is seeded by a supercontinuum generated in a photonic crystal fiber
Summary
Sources of tunable ultrashort laser pulses are essential tools for probing fast phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology. In an OPA coupling of three waves via the nonlinear polarization enables photons from the intense pump wave to be efficiently converted into (lower-energy) signal photons and the same number of so-called idler photons Such a scheme requires fulfilled energy and momentum conservation, termed as phase-matching, determining the interacting wavelengths and in particular the tunability and bandwidth of the parametric amplification. For that reason parametric amplification is highly suited for high repetition-rate and high average power applications In this context fiber lasers and amplifiers represent an interesting alternative to the conventional Ti:Sapphire-based systems as they can supply high average powers as well as high pulse energies[8]. To our knowledge this represents the first demonstration of μJ level and MHz repetition rate ultrashort laser pulses in a power scalable architecture
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