Highest peak power and excellent stability

(Forschungsverbund Berlin) Optical amplifiers based on chirped pulse amplification (CPA) are used to generate high intensity pulses. In the CPA scheme, a weak temporally stretched seed pulse is amplified to high energy in a laser amplifier and finally re-compressed resulting in an ultrashort pulse of very high intensity. Applying this concept a new system was developed at MBI delivering few-ps pulses at 2 μm wavelength with peak power beyond 10 GW at a 1 kHz repetition rate.