Dual-Chirped Optical Parametric Amplification: A Method for Generating Super-Intense Mid-Infrared Few-Cycle Pulses

High-energy infrared (IR) femtosecond laser sources are important for applications in ultrafast and strong-field laser science; thus, considerable effort has recently been made to develop such laser systems. In this paper, we review our recent work on developing TW-class mid-infrared (MIR) femtosecond laser pulses in the 1-4 mu m region using a dual-chirped optical parametric amplification (DC-OPA) method. By employing a Ti:sapphire laser with sub-joule energy to pump the DC-OPA system, MIR femtosecond pulses with 100-mJ-class energy are demonstrated. Efficient energy scalability and flexible wavelength tunability in DC-OPA are confirmed experimentally. Different features of DC-OPA from those of conventional OPA and narrow-band pumped optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) are observed. By precisely optimizing the chirps of the seed and pump pulses in the DC-OPA system, bandwidth narrowing of amplified pulses can be minimized in an energy-scaling strategy. Moreover, DC-OPA can be universally employed for the energy scaling of near-IR, MIR, and far-IR pulses, regardless of the type of nonlinear crystal, and is helpful for efficiently generating few-cycle carrier-envelope phase stable IR pulses with TW-class peak power.