Temporal contrast control at the PHELIX petawatt laser facility by means of tunable sub-picosecond optical parametric amplification

We report on the development of a preamplifier module for temporal contrast enhancement and control at petawatt-class lasers. The module is based on an ultrafast optical parametric amplifier (uOPA), which produces temporally clean pulses at the 60 μJ level for seeding a chirped pulse amplification (...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied physics. B, Lasers and optics Vol. 116; no. 2; pp. 429 - 435
Main Authors Wagner, F., João, C. P., Fils, J., Gottschall, T., Hein, J., Körner, J., Limpert, J., Roth, M., Stöhlker, T., Bagnoud, V.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.08.2014
Subjects
Amplification
Amplifiers
Engineering
Gain
Lasers
Modules
Nucleation
Optical Devices
Optics
Photonics
Physical Chemistry
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Optics
Temporal logic
Tuning
Regenerative Amplifier
Temporal Contrast
Seed Pulse
Pump Pulse
Amplify Spontaneous Emission
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Summary:We report on the development of a preamplifier module for temporal contrast enhancement and control at petawatt-class lasers. The module is based on an ultrafast optical parametric amplifier (uOPA), which produces temporally clean pulses at the 60 μJ level for seeding a chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system, namely the petawatt facility PHELIX. The amplifier module allows for gain reduction in the following amplifiers, resulting in an attenuation of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) by more than 4 orders of magnitude. Since the ASE of a CPA system linearly depends on the seeding energy, we were able to demonstrate a continuous variation of the temporal contrast by tuning the gain of the uOPA.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0946-2171
1432-0649
DOI:10.1007/s00340-013-5714-9