Abstract

In order to carry out applications with single attosecond pulses isolated by controlling the carrier-envelop-phase (CEP) of the driving field in a reasonable time, the need of CEP-stabilized laser sources, currently based on Ti:sapphire, delivering pulses with both high peak and average power will increase in the next few years. The development of two technologies e.g. non-collinear optical parametric amplification (NOPA) and high power fiber amplifiers enables when coupled together to circumvent thermal and bandwidth issues [1]. The soliton-based technique is often presented [2,3] as the best candidate to transfer energy from the fundamental wavelength around 800 nm to the rare-earth gain bandwidth of the pump laser but the intensity dependence of the soliton translated directly into a frequency shift in the rare-earth gain medium is the main drawback. On the other hand, sub-10 fs Ti:Sapphire oscillators have a so broad spectrum that the infrared edge of the spectrum can overlap with the amplification bandwidth of rare-earth gain media. Direct seeding has been demonstrated in neodyme-based amplifiers [2,4] but not in ytterbium-based materials and this is the scope of this contribution.

© 2009 IEEE