During amplification in a noncollinear optical parametric amplifier the spatial and temporal coordinates of the amplified field are inherently coupled. These couplings or distortions can limit the peak intensity, among ...

Femtosecond pulse generation was pioneered four decades ago using mode-locked dye lasers, which dominated the field for the following 20 years. Dye lasers were then replaced with titanium-doped sapphire (Ti:Sa) lasers, ...

A new method for obtaining high beam quality from high pulse energy optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) is demonstrated. By using different nonlinear crystals that have walk-off in orthogonal directions but are type 2 ...

Peak and average power scalability is the key feature of advancing femtosecond laser technology. Today, near-infrared light sources are capable of providing hundreds of Watts of average power. These sources, however, ...

We report a 100 W, 20 mJ, 1-ps, all-Yb:YAG thin-disk regenerative amplifier seeded by a microjoule-level Yb:YAG thin-disk Kerr-lens mode-locked oscillator. The regenerative amplifier is implemented in a chirped pulse ...

Spectral broadening in bulk material is a simple, robust and low-cost method to extend the bandwidth of a laser source. Consequently, it enables ultrashort pulse compression. Experiments with a 38 MHz repetition rate, 50 ...

We show by experiments and simulations that properly chirped laser pulses enable efficient and broadband sum frequency generation in nonlinear crystals. We achieved high energy, picosecond deep-UV pulses with spectral ...

We describe a system for parametric conversion of high-energy, Q-switched laser pulses from 1.064 µm to 2.1 µm in KTiOPO4. High beam quality and efficiency are obtained by use of a two-stage system: An optical parametric ...

We report on the generation of a multi-octave, phase-stable continuum from the output of a Yb:YAG regenerative amplifier delivering 1-ps pulses with randomly varying carrier-envelope phase (CEP). The intrinsically CEP-stable ...

Picosecond, flat-top, deep-UV pulses are needed to generate high-brightness electron beams to efficiently drive x-ray free electron lasers. Current metal photocathodes have low efficiency and therefore require high-energy ...