Bedřich Rus

We present a 100 mJ Yb:YAG amplifier with a repetition rate of 20 Hz. The amplifier is built to seed a cryogenically cooled 10 J-class amplifier for pumping a high-energy optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier (OPCPA). Efficient OPCPA pumping requires a flat top pump pulse in space and time, so the pulses are shaped with an arbitrary waveform generator to ensure a flat profile at the output of the amplifier, even after any gain saturation effects.

Abstract A dual-output thin-disk picosecond laser operating at 100 W with 1 kHz repetition rate is reported in this Letter. By electronically adjusting the amplitude of the optical seed pulses that are injected into the laser cavity, the energy extracted from the gain medium can be shared between two pulses. Amplified double pulses are subsequently spatially separated into two independent beams by a fast Pockels cell, compressed in one common compressor, and frequency-doubled with ∼70% efficiency.

Zbyněk Hubka, Roman Antipenkov, Robert Boge, Emily Erdman, Michael Greco, Jonathan T. Green, Martin Horáček, Karel Majer, Tomáš Mazanec, Petr Mazůrek, Jack A. Naylon, Jakub Novák, Václav Šobr, Petr Strkula, Murat Torun, Boguslaw Tykalewicz, Pavel Bakule, and Bedřich Rus Author Information Author Affiliations Zbyněk Hubka,1,2,* Roman Antipenkov,1 Robert Boge,1 Emily Erdman,1,3 Michael Greco,1 Jonathan T. Green,1 Martin Horáček,1 Karel Majer,1 Tomáš Mazanec,1 Petr Mazůrek,1 Jack A.