Dramatic beam steering by kerr lensing in optical parametric amplifiers

Femtosecond pulses are primarily generated at 800 or 1030 nm in Tiisapphire or Yb based systems. To generate fully tunable pulses over the full visible and NIR range, optical parametric amplifiers and in particular white light seeded noncollinear optical parametric amplifiers (NOPA) are now widely used. For highest energy pulses this scheme is expanded to OPCPAs. Energy and beam pointing stability is a crucial topic in the application of all these sources. We investigated — to the best of our knowledge for the first time — how the beam pointing instability of the pump laser source translates to the NOPA output.