70 mJ nonlinear compression and scaling route for an Yb amplifier using large-core hollow fibers
G. Fan, Paolo Carpeggiani, Zhensheng Tao, Giulio Coccia, Reza Safaei, Edgar Kaksis, A. Pugžlys, François Légaré, Bruno E. Schmidt, Andrius Baltuška
Abstract
In this Letter, we investigate the energy-scaling rules of hollow-core fiber (HCF)-based nonlinear pulse propagation and compression merged with high-energy Yb-laser technology, in a regime where the effects such as plasma disturbance, optical damages, and setup size become important limiting parameters. As a demonstration, 70 mJ 230 fs pulses from a high-energy Yb laser amplifier were compressed down to 40 mJ 25 fs by using a 2.8-m-long stretched HCF with a core diameter of 1 mm, resulting in a record peak power of 1.3 TW. This work presents a critical advance of a high-energy pulse (hundreds of mJ level) nonlinear interactions platform based on high energy sub-ps Yb technology with considerable applications, including driving intense THz, X-ray pulses, Wakefield acceleration, parametric wave mixing and ultraviolet generation, and tunable long-wavelength generation via enhanced Raman scattering.