Abstract

Reliable picosecond pump lasers with high peak power are important for energy scaling of modern ultra-broadband optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers (OPCPA) [1, 2]. However, not many diode-pumped solid-state laser systems have been reported so far that deliver picosecond pulses with peak powers in the MW regime. Most of them are limited to repetition rates below 10 kHz [3, 4]. We adopt the InnoSlab concept [5, 6] for amplifying energetic picosecond pulses at 50-100 kHz repetition rate from a Duetto laser from Time-Bandwidth Products Inc. This concept has been proven for the amplification of low peak-power lasers without deteriorating beam quality and noise performance [5]. Up to now slab amplifiers have only been used for picosecond pulses in a side pumped geometry yielding <20 MW peak power [4]. Here, we present a four-pass Nd:YVO₄ InnoSlab amplifier with a record high peak power of 50 MW and 12 ps pulse duration. It exhibits excellent noise performance with pulse fluctuation below 0.8% rms.

© 2011 Optical Society of America