Compression of long-cavity Ti:sapphire oscillator pulses with large-mode-area photonic crystal fibers

Motivated by the pulse compression challenge of novel long-cavity, high-pulse-energy Ti:sapphire laser oscillators, we report on ~280 nm supercontinuum generation and 4.5-times compression of close to transform limited, high-energy oscillator pulses using different large-mode-area photonic crystal fibers and standard chirped mirrors. As input, we used pulses of a long-cavity Ti:sapphire oscillator with 190 nJ pulse energy, 70 fs pulse length and 3.6 MHz repetition rate. Compressed pulses at the fiber/compressor output had a duration of 15–18 fs with up to 100 nJ pulse energy representing as much as 53 % throughput for the fiber/chirped mirror system. Using transform-limited input pulses, we could use short fiber pieces and thus a simple, low-dispersion chirped mirror compressor comprised of one pair of mirrors.