Status of the Petawatt Field Synthesizer - Pump-seed synchronization measurements

Abstract

The Petawatt-Field-Synthesizer (PFS) project at theMax-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (Garching), aims at combining few-cycle pulse durations with petawatt-scale peak powers by using short pulses (on the few-ps scale) for both seeding and pumping an optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) chain. Such a short-pulse pumped OPCPA approach imposes very strict demands on the synchronization between the seed and the pump pulses, i.e. the timing jitter between the pulses has to be below the 100 fs-level. We report on recent progress on the development of the PFS system, in particular about the investigation of the pump-seed timing jitter. We have identified the grating stretcher/compressor setup of the pump laser chain as the main source of a temporal instability of about >200 fs rms and propose ways to eliminate this in order to allow for first short-pusle pumped OPCPA experiments. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.