Development of a novel large bandwidth front-end system for high peak power OPCPA systems

We present the development of a laser system capable of generating bandwidths sufficient to support a sub 30fs pulse at 910nm. These pulses have been amplified to 500mJ of energy at 2Hz in two stages. The contrast measurements show that the initial seed is clean and suggests that the close in contrast is limited by the evaluation stretcher and compressor. Such a system is suitable for seeding high energy high power OPCPA systems based on KD*P. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America