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.

High-Peak-Power Long-Wave Infrared Lasers with CO2 Amplifiers

Long-wave infrared (LWIR) picosecond pulses with multi-terawatt peak power have recently become available for advanced high-energy physics and material research. Multi-joule pulse energy is achieved in an LWIR laser system via amplification of a microjoule seed pulse with high-pressure, mixed-isotope CO2 amplifiers. A chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) scheme is employed in such a laser to reduce the nonlinear interaction between the optical field and the transmissive elements of the system. Presently, a research and development effort is underway towards an even higher LWIR peak power that is required, for instance, for promising particle acceleration schemes. The required boost of the peak power can be achieved by reducing the pulse duration to fractions of a picosecond. For this purpose, the possibility of reducing the gain narrowing in the laser amplifiers and post-compression techniques are being studied. Another direction in research is aimed at the increased throughput (i.e., repetition rate), efficiency, and reliability of LWIR laser systems. The transition from a traditional electric-discharge pumping to an optical pumping scheme for CO2 amplifiers is expected to improve the robustness of high-peak-power LWIR lasers, making them suitable for broad implementation in scientific laboratory, industrial, and clinical environments.