Compact fiber amplifier pumped OPCPA system delivering Gigawatt peak power 35 fs pulses

We report on a compact Gigawatt peak power OPCPA system which is pumped by the second harmonic of an Yb-doped fiber amplifier and seeded by a cavity dumped Ti:Sapphire oscillator. Picosecond pump pulses for the OPCPA are generated by spectral filtering and directly amplified to 1 mJ pulse energy in several fiber amplifiers, without the need of chirped pulse amplification. Since no stretcher and compressor is required, the pump laser is very compact and easy to operate. The two stage optical parametric amplifier delivers 35 fs pulses with 53 mu J pulse energy and 1.1 GW peak power at 40 kHz repetition rate. Additionally, the scaling potential of this approach is discussed. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America