Post-Compression of Pulses from an Yb Amplifier to 25fs at 40mJ

The development of intense, short pulse duration IR driver has been one of the most demanding challenges pursued in the field of ultrafast optics over the past decades, driven by a number of applications in strong field physics, such as coherent soft X-ray high-harmonic generation [1], incoherent hard X-ray generation [2], laser-plasma acceleration [3], filamentation for atmospheric remote sensing. Different post-compression approaches have been demonstrated to achieve intense TW peak power pulses. Hollow core fibre (HCF) compression is one of the most successful and straightforward approaches, delivering excellent spatial profile as compared to filamentation [5]. So far, the output pulse energy of HCF compression for state-of-the-art Ti:Sapphire lasers is limited only to few mJ [6] due to the limits in critical peak power. Recently, the compression of laser pulses to the record value of 13mJ has been demonstrated, but with an efficiency below 20% [6]. In this work, we demonstrated a new route for generation and highly efficient compression of TW pulses with multi-tens mJ level. The combination of the start of art, high energy Yb laser with stretched HCF waveguide technology enabled us to achieve the record value of 40mJ, 25fs.