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Cord Arnold

Coordinator of Rydberg seminars

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Post-compression of multi-millijoule picosecond pulses to few-cycles approaching the terawatt regime

Author

  • Supriya Rajhans
  • Esmerando Escoto
  • Nikita Khodakovskiy
  • Praveen K. Velpula
  • Bonaventura Farace
  • Uwe Grosse-Wortmann
  • Rob J. Shalloo
  • Cord L. Arnold
  • Kristjan Põder
  • Jens Osterhoff
  • Wim P. Leemans
  • Ingmar Hartl
  • Christoph M. Heyl
Show all

Summary, in English

Advancing ultrafast high-repetition-rate lasers to shortest pulse durations comprising only a few optical cycles while pushing their energy into the multi-millijoule regime opens a route toward terawatt-class peak powers at unprecedented average power. We explore this route via efficient post-compression of high-energy 1.2 ps pulses from an ytterbium InnoSlab laser to 9.6 fs duration using gas-filled multi-pass cells (MPCs) at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. Employing dual-stage compression with a second MPC stage supporting a close-to-octave-spanning bandwidth enabled by dispersion-matched dielectric mirrors, a record compression factor of 125 is reached at 70% overall efficiency, delivering 6.7 mJ pulses with a peak power of ∼0.3 TW. Moreover, we show that post-compression can improve the temporal contrast at multi-picosecond delay by at least one order of magnitude. Our results demonstrate efficient conversion of multi-millijoule picosecond lasers to high-peak-power few-cycle sources, prospectively opening up new parameter regimes for laser plasma physics, high energy physics, biomedicine, and attosecond science.

Department/s

  • LU Profile Area: Light and Materials
  • LTH Profile Area: Photon Science and Technology
  • LTH Profile Area: Nanoscience and Semiconductor Technology
  • NanoLund: Centre for Nanoscience
  • Atomic Physics

Publishing year

2023-09-15

Language

English

Pages

4753-4756

Publication/Series

Optics Letters

Volume

48

Issue

18

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Optical Society of America

Topic

  • Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0146-9592