Saturation control of an optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier

Optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) is a light amplification technique that provides the combination of broad spectral gain bandwidth and large energy, directly supporting few-cycle pulses with multi-terawatt (TW) peak powers. Saturation in an OPCPA increases the stability and conversion efficiency of the system. However, distinct spectral components experience different gain and do not saturate under the same conditions, which reduces performance. Here, we describe a simple and robust approach to control the saturation for all spectral components. The demonstrated optimal saturation increases the overall gain, conversion efficiency and spectral bandwidth. We experimentally obtain an improvement of the pulse energy by more than 18%. This technique is easily implemented in any existing OPCPA system with a pulse shaper to maximize its output.