Temporal contrast enhancement for optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers by adopting cascaded second harmonic generation pump

We report on a method to enhance the temporal contrast of optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers (OPCPAs) by smoothing pump noise. The instantaneous parametric gain in OPCPA couples the temporal modulation on the pump pulses to spectral variations of the intensity of the stretched signal pulses being amplified. In this way, pump noise significantly degrades the temporal contrast of the amplified pulses after recompression. Cascaded second harmonic generation (SHG) is adopted to smooth modulation on the pump pulses in the proposed method. Apparent reduction of modulation on the pump pulses is observed in the experiments. Numerical simulation reproduces the experimental results. Simulation results show that cascaded SHG with stable output 2  ω can enhance the temporal contrast for OPCPAs with four to five orders. It is believed that this new method can be widely adopted to build high-contrast OPCPA systems.