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Series in Quantum Electronics
edited by
Henry Baltes, Peter Günter, Ursula Keller,
Fritz K. Kneubühl †, Walter Lukosz,
Hans Melchior, Markus W. Sigrist
Vol. 56
Clemens Heese
High-Power Mid-Infrared Femtosecond Laser Pulses
1st edition 2012. XIV, 80 pages, € 64,00.
ISBN 978-3-86628-431-9
The rising interest in laser sources at uncommon
wavelength with a huge variety of system parameters poses a high demand on the
adaptability of laser sources to a specific application. A source whose
properties can be adjusted without changing its underlying concept is
especially valuable for research laser labs, where demands on the sources are
changing rapidly.
A concept that is customisable
in many ways is optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA). It can
amplify laser pulses of very low energy at wavelength ranging from UV to deep
IR, because it is not relying on suitable optical transitions in the laser
material like in classical laser amplifiers. Furthermore during amplification
no energy is deposited in the material, facilitating power as well as
repetition rate and energy scaling. Nevertheless, to be able to use the OPCPA
concept for few-cycle pulse amplification, a combination of pump and output
wavelengths needs to be found, enabling broadband amplification in the used
optical parametric amplification (OPA) crystal. The use of a high-power pump
laser usually restricts the pump wavelength to the spectral region close to 1
µm. Unfortunately this wavelength does not favour broadband amplification of many spectral regions.
One solution to overcome this limitation is the use of
quasi-phasematching (QPM) technology to enable
efficient energy transfer from the pump to all wavelengths of the seed pulses.
It can be used to amplify laser pulses at wavelengths throughout the whole
transparency range of the used amplification crystal. By imprinting a suitable
QPM grating structure into the crystal, one can select a spectral window to be
amplified. Implementing sophisticated QPM gratings, it is even possible to
engineer the output properties of the amplified pulses, for example the
temporal shape or the optical spectrum.
Within the scope of this thesis the successful
integration of chirped QPM gratings for the amplification of few-cycle laser
pulses is demonstrated. This yields a highly flexible source for generating
ultra short laser pulses.
About the author:
Clemens Heese received his diploma in physics from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster (Germany) in 2008. He joined the Institute of
Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich in the same year. His research interests
focus on ultrafast laser pulses in the mid-infrared spectral region. These
pulses are powerful tools for fundamental quantum mechanical studies as well as
for a broad area of spectroscopic applications.
Keywords: ultra short few-cycle laser pulses. ultrafast lasers, Peak Power Scaling, modelocked
Thin Disk Lasers
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