Laser Pumping and Seeding
Sophisticated scientific laser systems, such as optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) systems, typically consist of multiple parts, with the most essential often being its front-end used for laser pumping and seeding.
Backed by a proven industrial-grade design that is the core of the PHAROS and CARBIDE laser families, FLINT femtosecond oscillators exhibit state-of-the-art performance with an output power of 20 W and sub-40 fs pulse duration. These oscillators support carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stabilization and repetition-rate locking to an external reference. The FLINT oscillator is an excellent laser source for seeding Yb/Nd-based ultrashort pulse laser amplifiers and pumping femtosecond optical parametric oscillators (OPOs), as demonstrated in the recent publications by J. Vengelis and I. Stasevičius. In addition, if CEP-stable output is desired, the FLINT oscillators (or oscillator output from PHAROS lasers) can be used to seed other laser sources. See application on CEP stabilization for more information.
Furthermore, due to inherently high-contrast output pulses, ORPHEUS-OPCPA has been adopted as a front-end in ultra-high intensity lasers. Benefiting from the industrial-grade stability and reliability of PHAROS and CARBIDE lasers, it delivers few-cycle, CEP-stable pulses in a package as compact as our standard parametric amplifiers and serves as a seed source for larger amplifiers, delivering background-free pulses with near-single-cycle bandwidths, excellent spectral phase coherence, and CEP stability. Most recently, Light Conversion’s front-end provided seed pulses for a pump and optically synchronized signal pulses for three consecutive OPCPA stages in the 4.4 TW OPCPA system. See the publication by M. Kretschmar et al. for more details.