Generation Of High-Energy Femtosecond Pulses By Use Of Spectral Broadening Effects In Yb:Yag Thin-Disk Regenerative Amplifiers

As a result of experimentally verified simulations of Yb:YAG regenerative amplifiers utilizing spectral broadening effects due to self-phase modulation, we provide a map for the optimized choice of initial chirp and internal group-delay dispersion (GDD) within the amplifier. We show that the shortest pulse durations can be obtained with negative internal GDD, being, however, limited by the damage threshold of the optical components due to increased peak powers and by a breakup of pulses comparable to the propagation of higher-order solitons. We propose that by usage of increasing amounts of positive internal GDD, along with a corresponding amount of negative initial GDD, the obtainable peak powers after compression can be scaled far beyond the usual gain-bandwidth limitation. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America