Scalable Yb-MOPA-driven carrier-envelope phase-stable few-cycle parametric amplifier at 1.5 microm.

ABSTRACT

Carrier-envelope phase-stable 4 microJ pulses at approximately 1.5 microm are obtained from a femtosecond YbKGW-MOPA-pumped two-stage optical parametric amplifier. This novel technology represents a highly attractive alternative to traditional Tisapphire front-ends for seeding multimillijoule-level optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers. For this task, we demonstrate stretching of the OPA output to approximately 40 ps and recompression to 33 fs pulse duration. As a stand-alone system, our tunable two-stage OPA might find numerous applications in time-resolved spectroscopy and micromachining.