Single-stage few-cycle nonlinear compression of milliJoule energy Ti:Sa femtosecond pulses in a multipass cell.

We report on the nonlinear temporal compression of mJ energy pulses from a Ti:Sa chirped pulse amplifier system in a multipass cell filled with argon. The pulses are compressed from 30 fs down to 5.3 fs, corresponding to two optical cycles. The post-compressed beam exhibits excellent spatial quality and homogeneity. These results provide guidelines for optimizing the compressed pulse quality and further scaling of multipass-cell-based post-compression down to the single-cycle regime.

Double plasma mirror for ultrahigh temporal contrast ultraintense laser pulses.

We present and characterize a very efficient optical device that employs the plasma mirror technique to increase the contrast of high-power laser systems. Contrast improvements higher than 10(4) with 50% transmission are shown to be routinely achieved on a typical 10 TW laser system when the pulse is reflected on two consecutive plasma mirrors. Used at the end of the laser system, this double plasma mirror preserves the spatial profile of the initial beam, is unaffected by shot-to-shot fluctuations, and is suitable for most high peak power laser systems. We use the generation of high-order harmonics as an effective test for the contrast improvement produced by the double plasma mirrors.

High-order harmonic generation by nonlinear reflection of an intense high-contrast laser pulse on a plasma.

We demonstrate the use of a plasma mirror to obtain 60-fs 10-TW laser pulses with a temporal contrast of 10(8) on a nanosecond time scale and 10(6) on a picosecond time scale, and we use these high-contrast pulses to generate high harmonics by nonlinear reflection on a plasma with a steep electronic density gradient. Well-collimated harmonics up to 20th order are observed for a laser intensity of approximately equal to 3 x 10(17) W/cm2, whereas no harmonics are obtained without the plasma mirror.