Carrier envelope phase stable, 5.4 mJ, broadband, mid infrared pulse generation from a 1 ps, Yb:YAG thin disk laser.
We report on a simple scheme to generate broadband, mJ pulses centered at 2.1 mm with an intrinsic carrier envelope phase (CEP) stability from the output of a Yb:YAG regenerative amplifier delivering 1 ps pulses with randomly varying CEP. To the best of our knowledge, the reported system has the highest optical to optical efficiency for converting 1 ps, 1 mm pulses to CEP stable, broadband, 2.1 mm pulses. The generated coherent light carries an energy of 5.4 mJ, at 5 kHz repetition rate, that can be scaled to higher energy or power by using a suitable front end, if required. The system is ideally suited for seeding broadband parametric amplifiers and multichannel synthesizers pumped by picosecond Yb doped amplifiers, obviating the need for active timing synchronization. Alternatively, this scheme can be combined with high power oscillators with tens of mJ energy to generate CEP stable, multioctave supercontinua, suitable for field resolved and time resolved spectroscopy.
Applied optics