New optical parametric amplifiers for isolated attosecond pulses generation at ultra-high repetition rate
by
Julien Nillon(Centre Lasers Intenses et Applications (CELIA), University Bordeaux, France)
→
Europe/Berlin
3.11 (AER19)
3.11
AER19
Description
While attosecond science reaches new frontiers in physics, the need for innovative primary sources suited for the generation of single attosecond (as) pulses emerges. Featuring high tunability, ultra-broadband amplification bandwidth and the ability of passively stabilizing the random Carrier-Envelope Phase (CEP) of any pump laser, Optical Parametric Amplification (OPA) has proven to be one of the most effective tools to meet the stringent requirements of High-Order Harmonics (HHG) driving sources.Moreover, following the pioneering work of J. Boullet at CELIA, there is a growing interest for higher repetition rate HHG sources, pumped by Ytterbium-doped fiber lasers. High-repetition rate, CEP-stable, few cycle pulses have been successfully generated by OPAs operating in the visible part of the spectrum. Shifting the amplified bandwidth towards longer wavelengths would be clearly profitable. In fact, the shorter harmonic wavelength cut-off will allow significantly extending the harmonics spectrum and consequently shorten as pulse durations. Until know, generation of CEP-stable, few-cycle pulses in the infrared at ultra-high repetition rates was impossible due to the issue of generating a broadband infrared seed directly from a fiber laser. In this seminar, I will present a new architecture based on a two-stage cascaded OPA pumped by a home-made fiber laser, which allowed us to generate CEP-stable 3-cycles pulses at the central wavelength of 2,2 µm, with an energy of 5 µJ at 100 kHz. I will then discuss the possibility of increasing the output power of parametric amplifiers to several tens of watts with broadband parametric combination of several fiber-pump beams.
