High-Stability High-Energy Picosecond Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier as a Preamplifier in Nd：Glass Petawatt System for Contrast Enhancement

We demonstrate a novel picosecond optical parametric preamplification to generate high-stability, high-energy and high-contrast seed pulses. The 5ps seed pulse is amplified from 60pJ to 300μJ with an 8.6ps/ 3mJ pump laser in a signal stage of short pulse non-collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification. The total gain is more than 106 and the rms energy stability is under 1.35%. The contrast ratio is higher than 10s within a scale of 20ps before the main pulse. Consequently, the improvement factor of the signal contrast is approximately equal to the gain 106 outside the pump window.

Amplification of fluorescence using collinear picosecond optical parametric amplification at degeneracy

We demonstrate the output characteristic of broadband parametric amplification of incoherent light pulses in a 355-nm pumped degenerate picosecond optical parametric amplification with either saturated or unsaturated amplification. The optical parametric amplifier is seeded by the fluorescence generated in a solution of pyridine-1 dye in ethanol. With the saturated amplification, we can obtain high energy incoherent light pulses, whose full width at half maximum bandwidth varies from 16 nm to 53 nm for the different phase matching angles near degeneracy. Moreover, the unsaturated bandwidth of the amplified pulses fits well to the calculated result at degeneracy. Selecting s-polarized fluorescence with a Glan-Taylor prism, the maximum bandwidth of the amplified fluorescence is found to be 59 nm for a purely s-polarized seed. The maximum output energy is 0.67 mJ for the optical parametric amplifier. By using an optical filter and compressor, the generated high energy incoherent light has great potential as the incoherent pump, signal or idler wave of a parametric down-conversion process, so that a wave with a high degree of coherence can be generated from an incoherent pump light.

Frequency up-conversion imaging with 60-dB gain using picosecond optical parametric amplifier

A weak infrared （IR） image amplifier with more than 60-dB optical gain and is developed from a picosecond （PS） 355-nm pumped gated optical parametric frequency up-conversion amplifier （OPA） in a/% BaB204 （BBO） crystal. The IR image at 1064 nm is amplified and up-converted into the visible region at 532 nm by parametric amplification and up-conversion. With the optimized optical gain, the lowest detectable energy of the image can be as low as 1.8 femto-Joule per pulse, which is three orders of magnitude lower than the detection limit of a charge-coupled device （CCD） camera. The transversal resolution of the OPA imaging is investigated, and the approaches for higher detection sensitivity and higher transversal resolution are proposed.