Arbitral pre-shaping of amplified ultrashort laser pulse before chirped pulse amplifier or optical fiber

Summary form only given. We experimentally demonstrated two ultrashort pulse delivery systems with adaptive pulse control. Our goal is to obtain arbitrarily shaped intense pulses in both amplitude and phase. For amplification, we use a chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) system with a regenerative amplifier, which generates /spl sim/500 mJ at 1 kHz. Our pulse shaper (PS) is placed before the amplifier to avoid causing damage in a spatial light modulator (SLM). Thus, the residual optical loss in the PS does not affect on the amplified output power. However, an obscure dispersion and nonlinear amplification, which are inherent in a regenerative amplifier, make it difficult to directly design phase-only masks for obtaining a desired waveform from the amplifier.