Temporal compensation method of pulse distortion in saturated laser amplifiers

Abstract

We provide a tunable temporal shaping method of a laser pulse to compensate pulse distortion in saturated laser amplifiers. The solutions of our computer programs, which express pulse distortion because of saturation effects in pulse laser amplifiers, determine the optimum input pulse shape required to produce a top-hat target pulse shape at the output of the saturated laser amplifier. With the tuning ability of the method provided here, the top-hat target pulse shape can be maintained at different output characteristic energies relative to the saturation energy of the amplifier. Moreover, the relation is experimentally verified using a solid-state laser amplifier chain. The method will prove useful in applications of high-energy laser amplifier systems that require a top-hat pulse shape to be efficient, such as the pump laser pulse of optical parametric chirped pulse amplification.