Recent progress on attosecond science at RIKEN
We have been developing two types of intense attosecond beam lines for investigating attosecond wavepackt dynamics in atoms and molecules. One produces an attosecond pulse train for attosecond Fourier transform spectroscopy by attosecond-pump/attosecond-probe scheme, while the other produces an intense isolated attosecond pulse for attosecond nonlinear optics.
Carrier-envelope phase stabilization of a 16 TW, 10  Hz Ti:sapphire laser.
We propose and demonstrate a simple and promising method for stabilizing the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of a high-energy ultrashort pulse laser operating at a low repetition rate. The method was successfully applied to a Ti:sapphire laser operating at 10 Hz with 400 mJ pulse energy and 25 fs pulse duration (16 TW). The laser system consists of a 1 kHz front-end preamplifier and a 10 Hz back-end power amplifier. By sampling a 500 Hz reference pulse from a 1 kHz seed pulse, the measured single-shot CEP noise of a 10 Hz amplified pulse is stabilized to 670 mrad rms. Our proposed CEP stabilization concept can be applied to single-shot ultrahigh-power lasers, such as a petawatt laser system.
Coherent pulsed injection seeding of two gain-switched semiconductor lasers
High-power, narrow-spectrum, short pulses at a wavelength near 830 nm are needed for optical logic applications. The authors report the generation of two coherent trains of pulses by pulsed injection seeding of two gain-switched semiconductor lasers with one mode-locked master oscillator. The available power was doubled and both lasers emit in nearly identical spectral lines. Short pulses (30-50 ps) are generated at a repetition rate of 1.9 GHz. The spectrum is reduced to a single mode cluster and shows a 1.7 AA wide chirp suitable for pulse compression. The peak power is 0.1 W for each pulse train. The capability of this technique for coherent power combining is demonstrated.<<ETX>>