Development of a broadband high power optical parametric chirped pulse amplification system

We present the design of the 10 TW OPCPA system which is currently being constructed for the Laser and Attosecond Physics laboratory at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and perform a detailed characterization of a newly developed picosecond pump source. The setup consists of a broadband femtosecond seed oscillator, three OPCPA stages and an independent 80-ps pump laser, whose repetition rate is actively synchronized to the repetition rate of a fs- oscillator. The pump laser is a Nd:YAG flash-lamp pumped system consisting of a Nd:YVO/sub 4/ based picosecond pulse oscillator, a regenerative amplifier, a two-pass pre-amplifier. and two power amplifiers. At the output system produces more than 1.4 J of 1064 nm in 90-ps pulses at a 10-Hz repetition rate. These pulses are frequency doubled in a DKDP crystal yielding about 700-mJ. 80-ps pulses at 532-nm with a multimode spatial profile and a nearly Gaussian temporal profile. The near-field pump beam profile is relay-imaged from the doubling crystal of the pump laser on each nonlinear crystal in order to have the best amplification efficiency.