Approaching the full octave: Noncollinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification with two-color pumping

We present a new method to broaden the amplification range in optical parametric amplification toward the bandwidth needed for single cycle femtosecond pulses. Two-color pumping of independent stages is used to sequentially amplify the long and short wavelength parts of the ultrabroadband seed pulses. The concept is tested in two related experiments. With multi-mJ pumping pulses with a nearly octave spanning spectrum and an uncompressed energy of 3 mJ are generated at low repetition rate. The spectral phase varies slowly and continuously in the overlap region as shown with 100 kHz repetition rate. This should allow the compression to the Fourier limit of below 5 fs in the high energy system. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America