To achieve multi-petawatt pulses, the generation of high-temporal-contrast few-cycle seed pulses with the central wavelength of 910 nm is the first step. In this research, high-performance seed pulses with a spectrum ranging from 800 nm to 1050 nm and pulse energy of 86 μJ are generated based on the filtered multi-plate spectral broadening and spectral filtering from a Yb-based femtosecond laser system. With self-phase modulation (SPM) induced spectral broadening, the input with relatively narrow spectrum bandwidth is broadened widely, which enables the final output pulse be compressed from full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 190 fs to 11.2 fs and a compression ratio of about 18 after dispersion compensation. The experiments show that the temporal contrast of the final output pulse is improved by at least four orders of magnitude through spectral filtering and new spectral components generated by third-order nonlinear processes such as SPM and self-focusing. Furthermore, taking advantage of single beam and self-focusing process, the final output has high energy stability and spectrum stability. Based on the merits above, together with its simplicity and robustness, this method proposed is expected to be used for the seed pulse generation of 10s-100s petawatt (PW) level laser system in the future.
High-energy PW laser pulses provide unprecedented extreme conditions which are key tools for exploring frontier fundamental researches. Recently, a new limitation from traditional grating-based pulse compressor appeared during achieve high-energy tens and hundreds PW laser pulses because the damage threshold and maximum size of diffraction gratings are not high or large enough to satisfy the requirement. Here, we propose feasible grating-based pulse compressors that can compress high-energy 100 PW laser pulse with a single beam. It contains two schemes, one is multistep pulse compressor that including pre-compressor, main compressor and post compressor, while the other is asymmetric four-grating compressor that replaces the pre-compressor and main compressor. The proposed novel grating-based pulse compressors increase the maximum bearable input and output pulse energies through modifying their spatiotemporal properties, and the introduced smoothing beam with spatial dispersion can be automatically compensated at the focal plane by using the spatiotemporal focusing technique. In this paper, we use Matlab to theoretically verify the possibility of the new grating-based pulse compressors. The simulation results are extremely consistent with our expectations that the two schemes can effectively smooth the beam by inducing spatial dispersion and effectively achieve 100 PW laser pulse. This creative optical design will simplify the high-energy compressor, improve the stability of PW laser system and ultimately increase the output laser energy, which allows us to explore more frontier fundamental researches.
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