A highly efficient broadband picosecond pump high gain OPCPA system for Ti-sapphire seed pulses: An ideal seed for a high- contrast, large energy/aperture CPA laser system -Vulcan.

摘要

The achievement of high contrast, high efficiency OPCPA systems has been a long established goal. We achieve close to ~20% conversion in a picosecond OPCPA system. This is now the standard seed for our petawatt pre-amplifier laser system which had a conventional 10~8 nanosecond gain. We thereby eliminate the need to the first nanosecond gain stage. We achieve a contrast at the 10~(-8) level when using the petawatt system in this configuration. We have also demonstrated a second stage of picosecond amplification with an extra gain of >2, maintaining the bandwidth and transform limited nature of the pulses, providing the potential for further improvements.