Generation of few-cycle infrared pulses from a degenerate dual-pump OPCPA

A degenerate dual-pump optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier (OPCPA) for generation of few-cycle intense pulses centered at 1.6 mu m is theoretically investigated. By adding the optimized linear chirp to the two pump pulses from Ti: sapphire source and carefully adjusting the delays between the two pumps and seed, the long-and short-wavelength components of the seed pulse are efficiently amplified during the parametric process. Our simulations show that a broadband spectrum spanning from 1.3 mu m to 2.1 mu m is attained with a conversion efficiency of 22.6%. Signal pulse with a near transform-limited (TL) duration of 10.1 fs can be achieved by simply removing the linear chirp from the output signal. Besides, the compressed signal beam manifests good quality both spectrally and temporally, which allows tightly focusing the signal beam for further use. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America