Post-compression of long-wave infrared 2 picosecond sub-terawatt pulses in bulk materials

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 29; no. 20; pp. 31714 - 31725
• Main Authors: Polyanskiy, Mikhail N., Pogorelsky, Igor V., Babzien, Marcus, Kupfer, Rotem, Vodopyanov, Konstantin L., Palmer, Mark A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Optical Society of America 27-09-2021
• Subjects: PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.434238

We have experimentally demonstrated the post-compression of a long-wave infrared (9.2 μm) 150 GW peak power pulse from 2 ps to less than 500 fs using a sequence of two bulk materials with negative group velocity dispersion (GVD). The compression resulted in up to 1.6-fold increase of the peak power and up to 2.8-fold increase of the intensity in the center of a quasi-Gaussian beam. The partial decoupling of the self-phase modulation and chirp compensation stages by using two materials with significantly different ratios of nonlinear refractive index to GVD provides accurate optimization of the compression mechanism and promises a viable path to scaling peak powers to supra-terawatt levels. During the preparatory study, we measured, for the first time to our knowledge, the nonlinear refractive indices of NaCl, KCl, and BaF 2 for picosecond pulses in the long-wave infrared region.