Abstract

High power femtosecond laser systems have seen enormous progress in the last decades with record-high average power, pulse energy and peak power. Among the different systems, modelocked thin-disk lasers (TDLs) are a particularly promising approach, as the simple oscillator geometries allow for compact setups with low-noise performance. However, for experiments in the area of strong-field physics, the pulse duration directly available out of these state-of-the-art systems still remains too long (> 500 fs). Methods for efficient external pulse compression of these sources combining high average power (>100 W) and peak power (>10 MW) to shorter pulse duration (< 100 fs) are needed. Spectral broadening and pulse compression in gas-filled inhibited coupling (IC) guiding Kagome hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) represents an ideal solution for such sources due to their intrinsic favorable guiding properties which allow for low-loss and low-dispersion hollow-core transmission with extremely high damage threshold [1]. Recently, transmission of mJ-level femtosecond pulses at watt-level average power [2] was demonstrated, as well as efficient compression of ps-pulses down to sub-50 fs at moderate output power of 4.1 W [3]. Until recently, it remained unclear whether efficient pulse compression at a multi-100-watt performance level could be achieved with this type of fiber.

© 2015 IEEE