Post-compression of High Average Power Picosecond Pulses for Few Cycle Generation and FEL Pump-Probe Experiments

Ultrafast Ytterbium-based (Yb) amplifiers can be power-scaled into the kilowatt (kW) regime, offering great potential for applications where repetition rate scaling of ultrafast lasers beyond the average power limits of Ti:sapphire technology is needed. Examples are future laser-driven accelerators and pump-probe experiments at superconducting X-ray free electron lasers (FEL). However, the gain bandwidth of Yb media limits the output pulse durations of such amplifiers to a few 100s of fs to 1 ps. External spectral broadening concepts can be employed for pulse post-compression, offering the possibility to combine ultrashort pulse durations, high repetition rates and milli-joule (mJ) level pulse energies. In