Applications
ATTO science
Time-resolved spectroscopy
Frontend for high power ultrafast amplifier systems
Fs-chemistry
Coherent THz generation
Materials processing
OPA pumping
Extraordinary Features
Ultrashort pulses
Highest pulse quality and stability
Excellent pulse contrast
Broad spectrum
Compact footprint
Ultrahigh peak power
Ultrafast oscillator output
FEMTOPOWER™ compact™ PRO
The FEMTOPOWER™ compact™ PRO is based on the multipass architecture for amplification of broadest bandwidths, shortest pulses, and highest ratio of the main pulse to the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) background. FEMTOLASERS has been installing amplifiers since 2000 with several tens of systems installed worldwide, being the first commercial company to offer integrated systems on one compact base plate providing sub-30 fs. Meanwhile sub-25 fs pulses are available as an option. The pulse duration can be further shortened to the few-cycle regime (< 7 fs) using our KALEIDOSCOPE™ hollow fiber compressor.
The multipass architechture minimizes the number of passes through the Ti:Sa crystal and bandwidth limiting elements such as the Pockels cell and polarizers, thus preventing gain narrowing and enabling the amplification of broadest spectra and subsequently shortest pulses. The specific layout of the amplifier results in an extremely high main pulse to ASE contrast ratio of >109:1 in the standard configuration and >1010:1 in optimised setups. This feature makes the FEMTOPOWER™ compact™ PRO the ultimate front-end for ultrahigh intensity systems that generate Terawatt and Petawatt peak power.
The FEMTOPOWER™ compact™ PRO does not use gratings for stretching and compressing pulses in the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) scheme. By using a glass stretcher and ultrabroad seed pulses, a minimal amount of dispersion is used to stretch the pulses sufficiently to be amplified safely. Dispersive mirror technology is used as part of the stretcher to compensate for higher orders of dispersion. The compression of the amplified pulses is done using a prism compressor, to which the stretcher is matched.
Using a prism compressor guarantees high transmission of typically around 85% - 90% versus typically 60% - 70% for standard grating compressors. For an equal amount of output power of compressed pulses, using a high transmission compressor, the pulses only need to be amplified to a lower level compared to a grating stretcher, and thus experience less gain narrowing.