Optimization of Optical Parametric Chirped-pulse Amplification

Optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) [1] is an established light amplification technique with many beneficial properties, like high single pass gain, scalability, large spectral bandwidth, tunability and good conversion efficiency. Different methods have been proposed for optimization of conversion [2] – [4] mainly altering the pump or the crystal properties. However, seed manipulation to increase the OPCPA conversion efficiency has been only described in a general spatiotemporal field optimization theory so far [5] . Here, we show numerical and experimental results of a novel method to improve the gain saturation in an ultra-broadband OPCPA, hence conversion efficiency, by applying an adaptive spectral filter function to the seed pulses.