Temporal pulse cleaning by a self-diffraction process for ultrashort laser pulses

Abstract

Applying the self-diffraction process to clean ultrashort laser pulses temporally is a recently developed effective way to temporal contrast enhancement. In this paper, we attempt to clean ultrashort laser pulses temporally by the self-diffraction process. Experiments were carried out to study the temporal contrast improvement in the front-end system of an ultraintense and ultrashort laser facility, i.e. the super intense laser for experiment on the extremes (SILEX-I). The results show that the maximum conversion efficiency of the first-order self-diffraction (SD1) pulse is 11%. The temporal contrast of the SD1 signal is improved by two orders of magnitude, i.e. to 103, for a 2.4-ns prepulse with initial contrast of ~10. For a 5.5 -ns prepulse with initial contrast of 2×103, the temporal contrast of the SD1 signal is improved by more than three orders of magnitude.