Demonstration of joule-level chirped pulse amplification based on tiled Ti:sapphire amplifier

A novel tiled Ti:sapphire(Ti:S)amplifier was experimentally demonstrated with>1 J amplified chirped pulse output.Two Ti:S crystals having dimensions of 14 mm×14 mm×25 mm were tiled as the gain medium in a four-pass amplifier.Maximum output energy of 1.18 J was obtained with 2.75 J pump energy.The energy conversion efficiency of the tiled Ti:S amplifier was comparable with a single Ti:S amplifier.The laser pulse having the maximum peak power of 28 TW was obtained after the compressor.Moreover,the influence of the beam gap on the far field was discussed.This novel tiled Ti:S amplifier technique can provide a potential way for 100 PW or EW lasers in the future.     

Nonlinear compression of picosecond chirped pulse from thin-disk amplifier system through a gas-filled hollow-core fiber

We theoretically study the nonlinear compression of a 20-m J, 1030-nm picosecond chirped pulse from the thin-disk amplifier in a krypton gas-filled hollow-core fiber. The chirp from the thin-disk amplifier system has little influence on the initial pulse, however, it shows an effect on the nonlinear compression in hollow-core fiber. We use a large diameter hollow waveguide to restrict undesirable nonlinear effects such as ionization; on the other hand, we employ suitable gas pressure and fiber length to promise enough spectral broadening; with 600-μm, 6-bar(1 bar = 105Pa), 1.8-m hollow fiber,we obtain 31.5-fs pulse. Moreover, we calculate and discuss the optimal fiber lengths and gas pressures with different initial durations induced by different grating compression angles for reaching a given bandwidth. These results are meaningful for a compression scheme from picoseconds to femtoseconds.