Generation of high-contrast, high-intene laser pulses by use of nonlinear pre-amplifier on Ti:sapphire laser system

Kiriyama, Hiromitsu; Mori, Michiaki; Daito, Izuru; Nakai, Yoshiki; Shimomura, Takuya*; Tanoue, Manabu*; Akutsu, Atsushi; Kondo, Shuji; Kanazawa, Shuhei; Okada, Hajime; et al.

no journal, , 

We report on a high-contrast, high-intensity Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification system that incorporates a nonlinear pre-amplifier based on optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA). By cooling the Ti:sapphire crystal in the final amplifier down to 77 K, the chirped-pulses are amplified to 2.9 J at 10 Hz repetition rate without thermal lensing effect. Pulse compression down to 19-fs duration obtained after amplification indicates a peak power of 80 TW. With the OPCPA, the temporal contrast is significantly improved to better than 7 10 in a few picoseconds interval prior to the main laser pulse.