Ultracold atoms, with their minimal spectral broadening and long interaction times, are ideal systems to explore and implement quantum state preparation and manipulation [1]. In particular, Raman processes in ultracold systems have proven to be a very useful tool in areas ranging from laser cooling and atom optics [2] to quantum information processing [3] and ultracold molecules [4]. The standa...

A high-average power, laser-diode-pumped, picosecond-pulse regenerative chirped pulse amplifier was developed by using the thin-rod Yb:YAG laser architecture. An average output power of 20 W was achieved at a repetition rate of 100 kHz with an output pulse width of 2 ps. 2008 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (140.3280) Lasers, amplifiers, (140.3615) Lasers, ytterbium, (140.3480) Lasers, ...

The paper is devoted to new trends in dispersive control techniques for ultrafast light emission. Acoustooptical dispersive delay lines for controlling the spectral components and phase composition of ultrashort laser pulses are considered. The method of super high frequency modulation of chirped femtosecond laser pulses is proposed. Theoretical approach to dispersive pulse shaping is supported...

We experimentally demonstrated the contrast enhancement in a Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) laser with a noncollinear femtosecond optical-parametric amplifier. A total gain of 3.4 × 10(4) and pulse energy of 26 μJ were achieved. With the clean high-energy seeding pulse, the contrast ratio of the main amplified laser pulse to the amplified spontaneous emission in the Ti: sapphire ...

This paper describes the integration of a short pulse optical parametric amplifier into the chirped pulse amplification beam lines of the Orion laser facility. This enables Orion to generate petawatt laser pulses at 1054 nm with a nanosecond contrast of >10(10). By combining this with frequency-doubling post compression, we can generate 100 J, 500 fs laser pulses with a nanosecond contrast calc...

We demonstrate the generation of nearly bandwidth-limited 8-fs optical pulses near 0.8 microm from a self-mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser oscillator, using chirped dielectric mirrors for dispersion control. The mode-locking performance is described, and limitations are discussed.

Carrier-envelope (CE) phase stabilization of a two-stage chirped pulse amplifier laser system with regenerative amplification as the preamplifier is demonstrated. The CE phase stability of this laser system is found to have a 90 mrad rms error averaged over 50 laser shots for a locking period of 4.5 h. The CE phase locking was confirmed unambiguously by experimental observation of the 2pi perio...

The effect of the frequency variation of laser pulse in uniform magnetized plasma is considered in onedimensional laser wakefield acceleration and carried out particle simulation. It is shown that wakefield amplitude is increased threefold for the negative Gaussian chirped laser pulse in the magnetized plasma. In our simulation, electrons with initial energy about 0.3 MeV with initial energy sp...

A petawatt-class laser system has been developed and laser intensity has recently reached a level as high as 10 22 W/cm 2 owning to the great progress in chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique. Such ultrahigh intense laser pulses provide powerful tools for laser-matter interaction experiments in the relativistic regime. In these plasma-creating experiments, laser pulses with high temporal ...

We have designed a laser system for the Linac Coherent Light Source rf photoinjector consisting of a Ti:Sapphire oscillator and 2 amplifiers using Chirped Pulse Amplification. The output after tripling will be 0.5 mJ tunable UV pulses at 120 Hz, with wavelength around 260 nm, pulsewidth of 10 ps FWHM and 200 fs rise and fall times. Amplitude stability is expected to be 1% rms in the UV and timi...