Contrast improvement of few-cycle pulses

Abstract: The intense few-cycle laser pulses play an important role in the investigations of laser-plasma interaction. However, one of the biggest challenges in their generation is the reduction of temporal intensity contrast by introducing undesired pre-pulses and a long pedestal. Two techniques were investigated in this work to improve the contrast. First, the crossed-polarized wave (XPW) generation was optimized to get clean pulse. The conditions for XPW were optimized including crystal thickness and maximal background pressure in the vacuum cell. Second, the method of elliptical polarization rotation (EPR) in a gas-filled hollow-core fiber (HCF) was implemented to produce both broadened and cleaned pulse, since its setup is much simpler. For the tested EPR-based nonlinear filter, the spectral smoothening and broadening were obtained. The contrast of cleaned pulse was characterized providing 2 order of magnitude contrast enhancement, while it had a high average power of 80 mW. The EPR-based nonlinear filter is a promising simplified technique in the development of intense few-cycle lasers.