The effects of pump pulse fluence on the output energy and amplified spontaneous emission of a femtosecond regenerative amplifier

In this paper, the effects of pump pulse fluence on the output energy and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of a femtosecond regenerative amplifier are investigated. One can easily enhance the output energy of laser amplifiers by increasing their pump fluence. This in turn can increase the ASE and reduce the performance of amplifiers in terms of output beam quality, beam stability, etc. This effect would eventually lead to what is called ‘temporal intensity contrast deterioration’. In this work, it is shown that an optimum state of the pump pulse fluence can indeed optimize the amount of the output energy from a regenerative amplifier without much reducing the performance of the amplifier due to the higher ASE. Temporal gain characteristics were employed to achieve this optimum value for a better design, performance, and maintenance of femtosecond laser amplifiers. The results of the current study can be effectively used in designing a wide range of regenerative amplifiers for femtosecond pulses.