Abstract

Lasers delivering few-cycle pulses (< 5 fs) play a prominent role in contemporary ultrafast science. Such pulses have very broad spectra, well beyond the gain bandwidth of conventional amplifying media. Therefore, to reach the few-cycle regime spectral broadening has to be applied to the amplified pulses. Recent advancements of laser technology boosted up the pulse energy of kHz CPA systems to 10-20mJ. Unfortunately the compression techniques did not keep pace with the rapid development of the lasers and the spectral broadening beyond the 1 mJ limit is still a great challenge severely limiting the performance of the overall light sources.

© 2013 IEEE