Experimental verification and analysis of wavelength effect on pulse stretching and compressing in mid-IR chirped-pulse amplification

As a consequence of the general experimental challenge to detect signals in mid-IR range, taking dispersive chirped near-IR laser pulses as the injected signal source seems to be an artistic route avoiding the daunting mid-IR stretcher and constantly was applied in moderate energy mid-IR optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifications (OPCPA) systems. In this paper we study the wavelength effect on pulse stretching and compressing in detail. Beginning with the theoretical analysis on each dispersion term of grating pairs, we evaluate the residual dispersions when pulse stretcher and compressor work at distinct wavelengths, which shows that this wavelength effect will result in poorly compressed pulses far from transform-limited. Via proof-of-principle experiments based on mid-IR OPCPAs and corresponding numerical simulations, we show that this artful configuration led to un-compressible pulses of similar to 2 ps with a time-bandwidth product of similar to 10 when the chirped-pulse duration is 400 ps. To overcome this effect, we demonstrate a simple design of pulse stretcher and compressor. The presented design consisted of a reflection grism-pair compressor can simultaneously cancel the quadric and cubic dispersions of conventional grating based stretcher, showing a potential ability of supporting high-contrast, sub-100-fs pulse-duration and 10,000 x of pulse expansion. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.