Amplification of ultrashort laser pulses by the OPCPA method at SOFIA laboratory

SOFIA laboratory is a test facility for the laser system PALS (Prague Asterix Laser System) and its major task is getting know-how of the OPCPA (Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification), a modern method of the amplification of ultrashort laser pulses. The SOFIA system is a hybrid laser where the oscillator beam is generated in a solid-state optical parametric oscillator (OPO) tuned to 1315 nm (the iodine spectral line) and then amplified in two gaseous iodine amplifiers. The 1315 nm beam is converted to 438 nm in KD*P crystals (4 GW/cm2) and pumps non-linear crystals (KDP, LBO) as parametric amplifiers. The signal beam for the parametric amplification is produced by Ti:sapphire laser and stretched to 300 ps in a pulse stretcher (single diffraction grating, Oeffner telescope) (Authors)