Active Supercontinuum Injection for Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification

Abstract

The anticipant supercontinuum is a prerequisite for the pump seed generation in an optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) system. To achieve the anticipant supercontinuum, we develop an active method operated in a two-level control scheme according to the near- and far-field patterns and supercontinuum spectrum. We demonstrate this method by the experiments of spectral shifting to 1053 and 1060 nm, which show the good availability and flexibility. By this method, the anticipant supercontinuum is outputted, and then, the stable seed for the pump beam can be generated. This method has been successfully applied to a pure Petawatt-class OPCPA system.

Keywords

• Active injection
• optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA)
• supercontinuum