Large-aperture chirped volume Bragg grating based fiber CPA system.

A fiber chirped pulse amplification system at 1558 nm was demonstrated using a large-aperture volume Bragg grating stretcher and compressor made of Photo-Thermal-Refractive (PTR) glass. Such PTR glass based gratings represent a new type of pulse stretching and compressing devices which are compact, monolithic and optically efficient. Furthermore, since PTR glass technology enables volume gratings with transverse apertures which are large, homogeneous and scalable, it also enables high pulse energies and powers far exceeding those achievable with other existing compact pulse-compression technologies. Additionally, reciprocity of chirped gratings with respect to stretching and compression also enables to address a long-standing problem in CPA system design of stretcher-compressor dispersion mismatch.

Generation of hard X-rays using an ultrafast fiber laser system.

We report the first hard X-ray source driven by a femtosecond fiber laser. The high energy fiber CPA system incorporated a 65mum LMA fiber amplifying stage which provided 300-fs recompressed pulses and diffraction limited beam quality with M(2) < 1.07. A deformable mirror was used to optimize the wavefront and the spot size was focused down to 2.3 mum with an f/1.2 paraboloidal mirror. 50muJ was deposited on the nickel target with 2x10(15)-W/cm(2) focal intensity and a distinctive Ni K(alpha)-line (7.48 keV) emission was measured with 5x10(-8) energy conversion efficiency.