Pulse contrast enhancement of high-energy pulses by use of a gas-filled hollow waveguide

Using nonlinear ellipse rotation in a gas-filled hollow waveguide, we have increased the pulse contrast of a microjoule femtosecond laser pulse by several orders of magnitude. This scheme offers a number of advantages over competing techniques, including a high degree of tunability that allows for a broad range of input pulse parameters, higher throughput, greater stability, and an output pulse with high spatial quality that is compressible to a quarter of the original temporal width. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.