High peak and average power generation by cascaded nonlinear compression of fiber CPA system

Numerical and analytical considerations of nonlinear compression in noble-gas-filled hollow core fiber pulse compressors are shown. Experiments are presented that enhance the peak power of existing fiber CPA architectures from 1.8 GW to 7.4 GW in a single stage. The pulses are shortened to 40 fs, which corresponds to a pulse shortening of more than one order of magnitude. Sending these pulses into a second hollow fiber further shortens the pulses to 25 fs at a pulse energy of 430 µJ at 30 kHz equaling an average power of 13 W. The peak power after the second stage is higher than 10 GW. In addition, we present very recent experiments on average power scaling of hollow fiber pulse compressors to the 100 W level. We compressed 200 W, 200 µJ, 500 fs pulses from a fiber CPA to 93 W, 93 µJ, 81 fs. These unique pulse parameters should be very well suited for high harmonic generation