Third-generation femtosecond technology

Chirped pulse amplification in solid-state lasers is currently the
method of choice for producing high-energy ultrashort pulses,
having surpassed the performance of dye lasers over 20 years ago.
The third generation of femtosecond technology based on
short-pulse-pumped optical parametric chirped pulse amplification
(OPCPA) holds promise for providing few-cycle pulses with
terawatt-scale peak powers and kilowatt-scale-average powers
simultaneously, heralding the next wave of attosecond and
femtosecond science. OPCPA laser systems pumped by near-1-ps pulses
support broadband and efficient amplification of few-cycle pulses
due to their unrivaled gain per unit length. This is rooted in the
high threshold for dielectric breakdown of the nonlinear crystals
for even shorter pump pulse durations. Concomitantly, short pump
pulses simplify dispersion management and improve the temporal
contrast of the amplified signal. This thesis covers the main
experimental and theoretical steps required to design and operate a
high-power, high-energy, few-cycle OPCPA. This includes the
generation of a broadband, high-contrast, carrier envelope phase
(CEP)-stable seed, the practical use of a high-power thin-disk
regenerative amplifier, its efficient use for pumping a multi-stage
OPCPA chain and compression of the resulting pulses. A theoretical
exploration of the concept and its extension to different modes of
operation, including widely-tunable, high-power multi-cycle pulse
trains, and ultrabroadband waveform synthesis is presented.
Finally, a conceptual design of a field synthesizer with
multi-terawatt, multi-octave light transients is discussed, which
holds promise for extending the photon energy attainable via high
harmonic generation to several kiloelectronvolts, nourishing the
hope for attosecond spectroscopy at hard-x-ray wavelengths.