Summary: | An intense broadband laser system based on a Nd:glass chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) requires a stable front end with good beam quality. To prepare such a front end without using a regenerative amplifier or optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) pumped by the second harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser, we have developed a fiber CPA system using laser diode (LD)-pumped single-mode fibers, large-mode-area (LMA) fibers, and photonic-crystal (rod) fibers. The output pulse energy achieved was 1.2 mJ at a central wavelength of 1053 nm with a spectral width of 10 nm. The power fluctuation was reduced to 0.4% rms at a repetition rate of 10 kHz. The output of this fiber laser is useful as a pump source for a few-cycle noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA) and a seed for a LD-pumped high-power Nd:glass CPA system.
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