A Novel Femtosecond Laser System for Attosecond Pulse Generation

We report a novel ultrabroadband high-energy femtosecond laser to be built in our laboratory. A 7-femtosecond pulse is firstly stretched by an eight-pass offner stretcher with a chirp rate 15 ps/nm, and then energy-amplified by a two-stage optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA). The first stage as preamplification with three pieces of BBO crystals provides the majority of the energy gain. At the second stage, a YCOB crystal with the aperture of ~50 mm is used instead of the KDP crystal as the gain medium to ensure the shortest pulse. After the completion, the laser will deliver about 8 J with pulse duration of about 10 femtoseconds, which should be beneficial to the attosecond pulse generation and other ultrafast experiments