Scalable Yb-MOPA-driven carrier-envelope phase-stable few-cycle parametric amplifier at 15 μm

Abstract

Carrier-envelope phase-stable 4 μJ pulses at ~1.5 μm are obtained from a femtosecond Yb:KGW-MOPA-pumped two-stage optical parametric amplifier. This novel technology represents a highly attractive alternative to traditional Ti:sapphire front-ends for seeding multimillijoule-level optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers. For this task, we demonstrate stretching of the OPA output to ~40 ps and recompression to 33 fs pulse duration. As a stand-alone system, our tunable two-stage OPA might find numerous applications in time-resolved spectroscopy and micromachining.