Post-compression of multi-millijoule picosecond pulses to few-cycles approaching the terawatt regime
Supriya Rajhans, Esmerando Escoto, Nikita Khodakovskiy, Praveen Kumar Velpula, Bonaventura Farace, Uwe Grosse‐Wortmann, R. J. Shalloo, Cord L. Arnold, Kristjan Põder, Jens Osterhoff, Wim Leemans, Ingmar Hartl, Christoph M. Heyl
Abstract
Advancing ultrafast high-repetition-rate lasers to shortest pulse durations comprising only a few optical cycles while pushing their energy into the multi-millijoule regime opens a route toward terawatt-class peak powers at unprecedented average power. We explore this route via efficient post-compression of high-energy 1.2 ps pulses from an ytterbium InnoSlab laser to 9.6 fs duration using gas-filled multi-pass cells (MPCs) at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. Employing dual-stage compression with a second MPC stage supporting a close-to-octave-spanning bandwidth enabled by dispersion-matched dielectric mirrors, a record compression factor of 125 is reached at 70% overall efficiency, delivering 6.7 mJ pulses with a peak power of ∼0.3 TW. Moreover, we show that post-compression can improve the temporal contrast at multi-picosecond delay by at least one order of magnitude. Our results demonstrate efficient conversion of multi-millijoule picosecond lasers to high-peak-power few-cycle sources, prospectively opening up new parameter regimes for laser plasma physics, high energy physics, biomedicine, and attosecond science.