Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) is one of the most powerful techniques for generating high-energy femtosecond laser pulses. Many efforts were devoted to get spectral-band amplification able to support sub-10-fs pulses. In the optical parametric amplification (OPA), broad gain bandwidths can be obtained if the wave-vectors mismatch, ∆k, slowly increases when the signal fre...

The dynamics of chirped pulse amplification in thin-disk regenerative amplifiers relevant to the pumping of optical parametric chirp pulse amplification systems are described. It is shown that the suitability for reproducible pumping of subsequent nonlinear processes requires a balance between the demands of avoiding chaotic pulse train dynamics and providing a reproducible spectral phase. We d...

Gas phase C60 is resonantly excited using picosecond infrared (IR) pulses from a free electron laser. The excitation can be very high, reaching levels where the thermal emission of electrons from C60 is observed. The excitation is much more efficient when the IR radiation is chirped to lower frequencies during the excitation process. The excitation process is modeled and the results are compare...

Gratings with variable periods (chirped gratings) have been fabricated by recording the interference pattern of a collimated laser beam with a converging beam generated by a cylindrical lens. An analysis is presented for the behavior of the chirped gratings as a function of wavelength, the angle between the illuminating beams, the F number of the lens, and its position. To calculate the power r...

The french Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA) develops a multipetawatt laser in the Laser Integration Line (LIL), prototype of the future Megajoule Laser [1]. This Petawatt laser line will deliver impulsions of 7.2 PW, 500 fs at the wavelength of 1053 nm. The chirped pulse amplification (CPA) method is used [2]. We work on the modelization and the fabrication of gratings used in the CPA sc...

The development of compact high-intensity lasers, made possible by the technique of chirped pulse amplification, is reviewed. This includes the complexities of high-power laser implementation, such as the generation of short pulses, pulse cleaning, wide-bandwidth amplification, temporal stretching and compression, and the requirements for high-average powers. Details of specific solid-state las...

The APS LEUTL free-electron laser (FEL) is a high-gain, short-wavelength device requiring a high-current, low-emittance beam. An rf photoinjector driven by a laser is used to provide the requisite beam. The drive laser consists of a diode-pumped Nd:Glass oscillator and a chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system consisting of a grating stretcher, a flashlamp-pumped Nd:Glass regenerative amplifie...

130-W average-power picosecond green laser pulses at 514.5 nm are generated from a frequency-doubled hybrid cryogenic Yb:YAG laser. A second-harmonic conversion efficiency of 54% is achieved with a 15-mm-long noncritically phase-matched lithium triborate (LBO) crystal from a 240-W 8-ps 78-MHz pulse train at 1029 nm. The high-average-power hybrid laser system consists of a picosecond fiber chirp...

In this paper we perform design consideration of a femtosecond linac-based synchrotron radiation facility. Proposed technique is based on the generation of energy chirped short electron bunches that would subsequently spontaneously radiate frequency chirped soft X-ray pulses in an undulator. These pulses are then spectrally dispersed using grazing incident grating. The spectrum is propagated th...