The suppression of pump-to-signal phase distortion transformation for optical parametric amplifiers in both temporal and spatial domains

Abstract

During the OPA (optical parametric amplifier) processes pumped by a high-energy laser, the phase distortion of pump light will transmit to the signal light inevitably. As a result, the beam quality of amplified signal will become poor. In this article, a hybrid seeding scheme with a paired two-stage OPA system is used, where the first and second stages used the signal and the idler as seed sources, respectively. The numerical results show that the hybrid seeding OPA scheme can suppress the phase distortion transformation from pump to signal in both spatial and temporal domains. Consequently, the phase of output signal is well restored to its input state. Because of the restriction removal of beam quality for pump light under the conventional birefringent phase-matching method, this scheme had a good application prospect in high-energy OPA or optical parametric chirped pulse amplification systems.