Abstract

We have recently developed a cw-argon- laser-p limped Tisapphire regenerative amplifier producing 130-fs, 1,7-μJ pulses around 800 nm, at repetition rates up to 450 kHz, These results were obtained with direct injection of 75-fs pulses (which stretched to about 10 ps in the amplifier because of material dispersion) and recompression using prisms.¹ Because the pulse stretching and compression relied only on the material dispersion in the amplifier and the prism dispersion, this compression scheme resulted in considerable wings in the autocorrelation of the output pulse because of residual third- order dispersion. In addition, as we increased the pulse energy, we found that the short pulse injection introduced some self-focusing effect in the amplifier, resulting in a degraded cavity mode.

© 1993 Optical Society of America