基于平衡光学互相关方法的超短脉冲激光相干合成技术

Coherent synthesis of ultrashort pulses based on balanced optical cross-correlator

相干合成技术是超快光学领域的重要研究方向之一.当单路脉冲激光的连续谱超过一个倍频程时,精确控制其光谱相位(色散管理)是获得亚周期超短脉冲激光的关键.由于常见的脉冲压缩系统存在光谱带宽限制,因此多通道相干合成技术受到了广泛的关注.本文将充气空心光纤展宽后的超倍频程连续光谱分波段独立压缩,并利用平衡光学互相关方法锁定子脉冲之间的相位延迟,获得了4.1 fs的合成脉冲.实验结果表明相干合成技术在高能量亚周期超快光场调控中存在优势.

Coherent synthesis of laser pulses is a major trend in the generation of ultrafast pulse field. There is no good way to compensate for the whole spectrum when the spectrum of ultrashort pulses is wide enough to reach an octave, so it is difficult to realize a sub-cycle pulse in a single-path laser system even if the spectrum range is wide enough. In this paper, 0.8 mJ, 30 fs laser pulses at 1 kHz repetition rate with 790 nm center wavelength from a Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) system are focused into hollow fiber with an inner diameter of 250 μm and a length of 1 m to produce an octave-spanning white-light supercontinuum (450-950 nm). Using this supercontinuum, we conduct two sets of comparative experiments. 1) We split the supercontinuum into two pulses with different spectrum ranges (450-750 nm and 650-1000 nm) by a dichroic mirror (HR, 500-700 nm; HT, 700-1000 nm), and we compress the two pulses by the double-chirped mirrors and wedge pairs to generate two few-cycle pulses:the long and short wavelength yielding pulses are 7.9 fs and 6.1 fs, respectively. Then we coherently synthesize two pulses by using another dichroic mirror, and controlling the relative time delay between the two pulses, and thus we synthesize a pulse of 4.1 fs. 2) We directly compress the supercontinuum by the double-chirped mirrors and wedge pairs, and obtain an optimization result of 5.3 fs, of which the pulse duration is wider than that in experiment 1. In these comparative experiments, the advantage of coherent synthesis for shorter pulse duration is preliminarily verified. Besides, the balanced optical cross-correlator technique is used to lock the relative time delay between two pulses. The root-mean-square value of relative time delay drift is less than 80 as in the case with feedback control loop, which ensures the stability of coherent synthesis system. This scheme can be adopted to accurately compensate for the dispersion and obtain the sub-cycle synthesized pulse, which is useful for generating the high harmonic and atto-second pulse.