High-speed adaptive deformable lens for boosting an high-energy optical parametric amplifier

Abstract

Intense ultrafast laser sources in the mid-IR have attracted in the recent years lot of attention in strong-field physics. A possible implementation for such sources relies in: a) the generation of a short IR seed by intra-pulse difference frequency generation (DFG) of a broadband continuum generated in an hollow-core fiber (HCF); b) optical parametric amplification (OPA) of the seed to the mJ level [1]. This approach yields a major advantage, namely the passive stabilization of the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) owing to the DFG process, enabling applications like the generation of isolated attosecond pulses in the soft X-rays. Nevertheless the CEP stability performances are limited with respect to those achievable with active stabilization techniques. Moreover, OPA setups require a very good beam quality as well as a robust stability of the pumping source and this can hinder the scalability towards higher pulse energies.