Modelling of saturated chirped pulse amplification and recompression

A model is presented of chirped pulse amplification and recompression which computes the effect on the recompressed pulse profile of both gain saturation and limited gain bandwidth in the amplifier. Results are presented for transform-limited 100 fs input pulses stretched to several picoseconds and amplified to different ratios of output fluence to saturation fluence in a KrF laser. The results can also be interpreted more generally in terms of amplification to a specified ratio of output fluence to saturation fluence.