Abstract
In recent years, OPCPA and NOPCPA laser systems have shown the potential to supersede Ti:sapphire plus post-compression based laser systems to drive next generation attosecond light sources via direct amplification of few-cycle pulses to high pulse energies at high repetition rates. In this paper, we present a sub 3-cycle, 100 kHz, 24 W NOPA laser system and characterise its spatio-temporal properties using the SEA-F-SPIDER technique. Our results underline the importance of spatio-temporal diagnostics for these emerging laser systems.
Highlights
IntroductionThe availability of carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) stable fewto single-cycle laser pulses [1] with sufficient pulse energy to efficiently drive high-order harmonic generation (HHG) combined with suitable gating techniques to isolate attosecond pulses from HHG has led to the creation and rapid growth of the field of attosecond science [2]
The availability of carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) stable fewto single-cycle laser pulses [1] with sufficient pulse energy to efficiently drive high-order harmonic generation (HHG) combined with suitable gating techniques to isolate attosecond pulses from HHG has led to the creation and rapid growth of the field of attosecond science [2].Most driver laser systems are based on mJ-level Ti:sapphire-based chirped pulse amplification (CPA) systems with active CEP stabilisation
Our non-collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers (NOPCPAs) laser system is based around a Ti:sapphire oscillator front-end
Summary
With the rapid advances in laser pulse generation with ever shorter durations, more and more sophisticated laser pulse metrology methods had to be developed going well beyond the simple autocorrelation [33]. A few recently introduced attosecond pulse gating techniques such as the attosecond lighthouse [36,37,38] or noncollinear gating of HHG [39, 40] make use of intentional spatiotemporal distortions where E (x, y, t) 1 E (x, y)E (t) Rather, in these systems the electric field is given by E(x, y, t) = E(x, y, t + ξxx + ξyy) with the spatio-temporal coupling coefficients ξx and ξy. All above mentioned methods inherently rely on a stable laser source over the duration of the scanning measurement and require that the temporal reference pulse measurement is performed with exactly the same dispersion compared to the spatial measurement after spatial filtering This is very difficult to achieve experimentally, especially for few-cycle pulses. In light of the specific problems arising when dealing with few-cycle pulses, we will discuss a pulse characteristion-technique able to perform spatio-temporal measurements in a self-referencing manner with zero-additional phase imposed onto the unknown pulse
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