Post-compression of multi-mJ picosecond pulses to few-cycles approaching the terawatt regime

Supriya Rajhans; Esmerando Escoto; Nikita Khodakovskiy; Praveen K. Velpula; Bonaventura Farace; Uwe Grosse-Wortmann; Rob J. Shalloo; Cord L. Arnold; Kristjan Põder; Jens Osterhoff; Wim P. Leemans; Ingmar Hartl; Christoph M. Heyl

arXiv · 2306.09674

Post-compression of multi-mJ picosecond pulses to few-cycles approaching the terawatt regime

Supriya Rajhans·Esmerando Escoto·Nikita Khodakovskiy·Praveen K. Velpula·Bonaventura Farace·Uwe Grosse-Wortmann·Rob J. Shalloo·Cord L. Arnold·Kristjan Põder·Jens Osterhoff·Wim P. Leemans·Ingmar Hartl·Christoph M. Heyl

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Abstract

Advancing ultrafast high-repetition-rate lasers to shortest pulse durations comprising only a few optical cycles while pushing their energy into the multi-millijoule regime opens a route towards terawatt-class peak powers at unprecedented average power. We explore this route via efficient post-compression of high-energy 1.2 ps pulses from an Ytterbium InnoSlab laser to 9.6 fs duration using gas-filled multi-pass cells (MPCs) at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. Employing dual-stage compression with a second MPC stage supporting a close-to-octave-spanning bandwidth enabled by dispersion-matched dielectric mirrors, a record compression factor of 125 is reached at 70% overall efficiency, delivering 6.7 mJ pulses with a peak power of about 0.3 TW. Moreover, we show that post-compression can improve the temporal contrast at picosecond delay by at least one order of magnitude. Our results demonstrate efficient conversion of multi-millijoule picosecond lasers to high-peak-power few-cycle sources, opening up new parameter regimes for laser plasma physics, high energy physics, biomedicine and attosecond science.

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Supriya Rajhans, Esmerando Escoto, Nikita Khodakovskiy, Praveen K. Velpula, Bonaventura Farace, Uwe Grosse-Wortmann, Rob J. Shalloo, Cord L. Arnold, Kristjan Põder, Jens Osterhoff, Wim P. Leemans, Ingmar Hartl, Christoph M. Heyl. 2023-06-16. Post-compression of multi-mJ picosecond pulses to few-cycles approaching the terawatt regime. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09674

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