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Design and Engineering of Ultrafast Amplifier Systems

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Date Issued:
2016
Abstract/Description:
Recently, the design and engineering of ultrafast laser systems have led to an extraordinary increase in laser power and performance which have brought about advances in many fields such as medicine, material processing, communications, remote sensing, spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, and atomic physics. In this work, several ultrafast amplification techniques -- including chirped-pulse amplification (CPA), optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA), and divided-pulse amplification (DPA) -- are described and demonstrated in the design and construction of two ultrafast laser facilities. An existing Ti:Sapphire laser system was completely redesigned with an increased power of 10 TW for experiments capable of generating hundreds of laser filaments in ordered arrays. The performance of DPA above the Joule-level was investigated in a series of experiments utilizing various DPA schemes with gain-saturated amplifiers at high pulse energy. A new high energy OPCPA facility has been designed and its pump laser system constructed, utilizing the technique of DPA for the first time in a flashlamp-pumped amplifier chain and with a record combined energy of 5 Joules in a 230 ps pulse duration. The demonstrated OPCPA pump performance will allow for the generation of 50 TW quasi-single cycle 5 fs pulses at 2.5 Hz from a table-top OPCPA system.
Title: Design and Engineering of Ultrafast Amplifier Systems.
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Name(s): Webb, Benjamin, Author
Richardson, Martin, Committee Chair
Chang, Zenghu, Committee Member
Delfyett, Peter, Committee Member
Gaume, Romain, Committee Member
Shah, Lawrence, Committee Member
Klemm, Richard, Committee Member
University of Central Florida, Degree Grantor
Type of Resource: text
Date Issued: 2016
Publisher: University of Central Florida
Language(s): English
Abstract/Description: Recently, the design and engineering of ultrafast laser systems have led to an extraordinary increase in laser power and performance which have brought about advances in many fields such as medicine, material processing, communications, remote sensing, spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, and atomic physics. In this work, several ultrafast amplification techniques -- including chirped-pulse amplification (CPA), optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA), and divided-pulse amplification (DPA) -- are described and demonstrated in the design and construction of two ultrafast laser facilities. An existing Ti:Sapphire laser system was completely redesigned with an increased power of 10 TW for experiments capable of generating hundreds of laser filaments in ordered arrays. The performance of DPA above the Joule-level was investigated in a series of experiments utilizing various DPA schemes with gain-saturated amplifiers at high pulse energy. A new high energy OPCPA facility has been designed and its pump laser system constructed, utilizing the technique of DPA for the first time in a flashlamp-pumped amplifier chain and with a record combined energy of 5 Joules in a 230 ps pulse duration. The demonstrated OPCPA pump performance will allow for the generation of 50 TW quasi-single cycle 5 fs pulses at 2.5 Hz from a table-top OPCPA system.
Identifier: CFE0006547 (IID), ucf:51349 (fedora)
Note(s): 2016-05-01
Ph.D.
Optics and Photonics, Optics and Photonics
Doctoral
This record was generated from author submitted information.
Subject(s): ultrafast laser -- CPA -- OPCPA -- DPA -- femtosecond laser
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006547
Restrictions on Access: campus 2021-11-15
Host Institution: UCF

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