Use of KDP crystal as a Kerr nonlinear medium for compressing PW laser pulses down to 10 fs
A. A. Shaykin, Vladislav Ginzburg, Ivan Yakovlev, Аnton Kochetkov, Alexey Kuzmin, Sergey Mironov, Ilya Shaikin, S. E. Stukachev, V. V. Lozhkarev, A. P. Prokhorov, Е. А. Хазанов
Abstract
Abstract The input pulse of the laser PEARL with energy of 18 J and pulse duration of about 60 fs was compressed to 10 fs after passage through a 4-mm-thick KDP crystal and reflection at two chirped mirrors with sum dispersion of −200 fs 2 . The experiments were performed for the В -integral values from 5 to 19 without visible damage to the optical elements, which indicates that small-scale self-focusing is not a significant issue. It was shown that, by virtue of the low dispersion of the group velocity, the KDP crystal has some advantages over silica: a larger pulse compression coefficient, especially at a small value of the В -integral ( B = 5, …, 9), lower absolute values of chirped mirror dispersion, and also a possibility to control the magnitude of nonlinearity and dispersion by changing crystal orientation.