Abstract
We demonstrated for the first time the application of a self-diffraction (SD) process in a bulk Kerr medium to improve the temporal, spectral, and spatial qualities of femtosecond laser pulses. A proof-of-principle experiment succeeded in improving the temporal contrast of a femtosecond pulse by four orders of magnitude even in the picosecond region using a 0.5-mm-thick fused silica glass plate by this technique. The energy conversion efficiency from the incident pulses to the two first-order SD signals is about 12%. By the SD process, a laser pulse with smoother spectral shape, higher beam quality, and shorter pulse duration than those of the input pulse was generated. This technique is expected to be used to design background-free petawatt laser system in the future.
Highlights
Owning to the great progress in chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) technique, a petawatt-class laser system has been developed [1] and laser intensity has recently reached a level as high as 1022 W/cm2 [2]
We demonstrated for the first time the application of a selfdiffraction (SD) process in a bulk Kerr medium to improve the temporal, spectral, and spatial qualities of femtosecond laser pulses
A proof-ofprinciple experiment succeeded in improving the temporal contrast of a femtosecond pulse by four orders of magnitude even in the picosecond region using a 0.5-mm-thick fused silica glass plate by this technique
Summary
Owning to the great progress in chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) technique, a petawatt-class laser system has been developed [1] and laser intensity has recently reached a level as high as 1022 W/cm2 [2] Such ultrahigh intense laser pulses provide powerful tools for laser-matter interaction experiments in the relativistic regime [3,4]. Several pulsecleaning techniques have been developed to improve the temporal contrast These methods include the use of saturable absorbers [1,12], a nonlinear Sagnac interferometer [13], plasma mirrors [14], polarization rotation [9,15,16], and cross-polarized wave (XPW) generation [2,11,17,18]. The contrast enhancement has been limited by the extinction ratio of the polarization discrimination device which is at best 4-5 orders [15,16,17,18]
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