Experimental investigation on pulse-contrast
degradation caused by surface reflection in optical
parametric chirped-pulse amplification
Xinliang Wang (王新亮)
1,2,3
, Xiaoming Lu (陆效明)
2
, Xiaoyang Guo (郭晓杨)
4
,
Rongjie Xu (许荣杰)
2
, and Yuxin Leng (冷雨欣)
2,3,
*
1
School of Physics Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
2
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
3
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
4
Osaka University, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
*Corresponding author: lengyuxin@mail.siom.ac.cn
Received January 3, 2018; accepted April 3, 2018; posted online April 27, 2018
In this Letter, we experimentally explore the pulse-contrast degradation caused by surface reflection in optical
parameter chirped-pulse amplification. Different pump-to-signal conversion efficiencies and post-pulses with
different intensities are obtained by changing the seed-pulse or pump-pulse energy and inserting etalons with
different reflection coefficients, respectively. The contrast measurements show that the generated first pre-pulse
intensity is proportional to the product of the surface reflection intensity ratio and the square of the
pump-to-signal conversion efficiency.
OCIS codes: 190.4410, 320.7110.
doi: 10.3788/COL201816.053201.
The development of chirped-pulse amplification (CPA)
[1]
and optical parametric CPA (OPCPA)
[2–4]
technology pro-
vides an extreme tool to study laser–matter interactions in
the relativistic regimes with on-target intensity exceeding
10
22
W∕cm
2
. So far, several 5 PW level laser systems have
been built among the world based on either CPA
[5,6]
or
OPCPA
[4]
technology. Compared with CPA, OPCPA
has many advantages, such as high single-pass gain,
broadband gain bandwidth, and low thermal loading ef-
fects. These features make it a very attractive technique
to generate ultra-short laser pulses in multi-petawatt
(PW) laser systems.
During the amplification of laser pulses, the pulse con-
trast may be degraded significantly, which is caused by
isolated pre-pulses or by a slowly varying pedestal after
pulse recompression. Since the intensity of noise above
the ionization threshold of the solid target could ionize
the target before the main pulse arrives, which would rad-
ically modify the laser–plasma interaction processes
[7]
, the
corresponding experiments require high contrast
[8]
. Basi-
cally, the long-time-range pedestal is usually caus ed by
the amplified spontaneous emission (in CPA systems)
[9]
or parametric fluorescence (in OPCPA systems)
[10]
gener-
ated in the amplified process, which could be overcome by
injecting a high-energy, high-contrast seed, or the high-
frequency noise pedestal generated in the stretcher, which
could be improved by avoiding the far-field high-frequency
noise
[11]
. The pre-pulses are usually transformed from the
post-pulses caused by surface reflection of the optical com-
ponents in laser systems. Generally, there exist several
generation mechanisms about the pre-pulses. In some am-
plifiers, such as a regenerative amplifier or a double-pass
amplifier, some post-pulses may experience different paths
with the main pulse, therefore, they go ahead of the main
pulse and become pre-pulses
[12]
. This case can be avoided
by carefully designing the amplifier or using wedged opti-
cal components. Didenko et al. have reported that the
post-pulses can also lead to pre-pulses under the nonlinear
effect in the amplification process
[13]
. Recently, Qian
et al. have theoretically studied a novel mechanism of
surface-reflection-initiated pulse-contrast degradation in
an OPCPA system by an analytical approach together
with numerical simulations
[14]
. According to their analysis,
the pre-pulses are initiated from the surface-reflectio n-
induced modulation of the seed spectrum and occur as
a consequence of high-order distortion of such modulated
spectrum. The intensity of the first pre-pulse increases
quadratically with the initial temporal modulation depth
of the stretched signal pulse, as well as the conversion ef-
ficiency prior to substantial pump dep letion. However,
they have not presented the experimental results to sup-
port it.
In this Letter, we perform the experimental investiga-
tions, which verify that the post-pulses may lead to the
pre-pulses in an OPCPA system. Our experiments are
carried out in a high-contrast 1053 nm laser system. To
investigate the relation between the post- and generated
pre-pulse, etalons with different reflection ratios are used
to generate post-pulses with different intensities. Besides,
the pump and seed intensities are also changed during the
experiment to vary the pump-to-signal conversion effi-
ciency. The experimental results reveal that the intensity
of the generated first pre-pulse is proportional to the prod-
uct of the intensity ratio of the surface reflection and the
COL 16(5), 053201(2018) CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS May 10, 2018
1671-7694/2018/053201(4) 053201-1 © 2018 Chinese Optics Letters