Chirped Pulse Amplification, the technique behind terawatt and petawatt lasers. A femtosecond seed pulse is stretched by a grating stretcher to hundreds of picoseconds or more, lowering its peak power so it can be amplified to millijoules or joules without damaging optics or triggering nonlinear effects. A matched grating compressor then squeezes it back to near its original duration.
CPA chain is fine through the regen, the problem's in the compressor, gratings are slightly out of parallel and the pulse is tilted.
Also heard as
- chirped pulse amplification
Related terms
Chirp
A change in instantaneous frequency across a pulse, so its colors arrive spread out in time.
Regen
Clipped form of regenerative amplifier, the cavity that traps a seed pulse for many passes of gain before releasing it.
Ti:sapph
Titanium-doped sapphire, the broadband tunable laser crystal behind most femtosecond oscillators and amplifiers.
GVD
Group Velocity Dispersion: how strongly a material's group velocity changes with wavelength, which stretches short pulses.
Damage threshold
The maximum fluence or power density an optic can take before it is permanently damaged.