Abstract
Contemporary CO2 laser systems are capable to delivering picosecond pulses of the multi-terawatt peak power. Further pulse compression to a few cycles is possible using a post-compression in bulk materials with negative group velocity dispersion (GVD). We have experimentally demonstrated the post-compression of a long-wave infrared (9.2 μm) 150-GW peak power pulse from 1.85 ps to less than 500 fs using a combination of two optical materials with significantly different ratios of the nonlinear refractive index to the GVD coefficient. Such combination allows for optimization of the compression mechanism and promises a viable path to scaling peak powers to multi-terawatt levels.
Highlights
Recent years have seen a growing interest in applying long-wave infrared (LWIR) lasers ( >4 m) to strongfield physics research
The duration of an ultra-short laser pulse is limited by the spectral bandwidth of the laser gain, which does not exceed ~1 THz for a CO2 laser potentially allowing to attain 500 fs [3]
The present-day CO2 laser systems are restricted to a few-picosecond minimum pulse duration due to the spectral narrowing of ultra-short seed pulses under a high amplification
Summary
Recent years have seen a growing interest in applying long-wave infrared (LWIR) lasers ( >4 m) to strongfield physics research This comes as the realization of benefits from the wavelength scaling for such applications as electron acceleration in plasma wake fields, ion beam generation from gas jets, intense gamma sources via inverse Compton scattering, energy transport through air, HHG, etc. Followed by dispersive compression with diffraction gratings, a chirped mirror, or a bulk material of a length L2 with a negative group velocity dispersion (GVD) this phase chirp can be compensated resulting in a pulse compression by ∆t≈∆ω(GVD)L2 This idea has been explored theoretically and experimentally mainly for the purpose of improving characteristics of near-IR solid state lasers [4, 5]. We report here the first experimental demonstration on post-compression of 2-ps, terawatt-class CO2 laser pulses to sub picoseconds using optical materials transparent at the =9.2 m
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