Improvement of the temporal and spatial contrast of high-brightness laser beams

Abstract

A novel method is suggested for temporal and spatial cleaning of high-brightness laser pulses, which seems more energy-scalable than that based on crossed polarizers and offers better contrast improvement compared to the plasma mirror technique. The suggested arrangement utilizes nonlinear modulation of the beam in the Fourier-plane leading both to directional and to temporal modulation. By the use of a ‘conjugate’ aperture arrangement before and after the nonlinear spatial selector, intensity dependent transmission is obtained; simultaneous temporal and spatial filtering can be realized both for amplitude and phase modulation. In the case of phase modulation introduced by plasma generation in noble gases the experimental observations are in good agreement with the theory; demonstrating >103 improvement in the temporal contrast, ~40% throughput, associated with effective spatial filtering. Due to the broad spectral and power durability of the optical arrangement used here, the method is widely applicable for energetic beams even of UV wavelengths, where most of the former techniques have limited throughput.