15fs-25fs tunable 1030nm laser source for few-cycle laser damage application

Ultrashort laser pulse interaction with solid contains an abundant electronic dynamic process. When the laser pulse width reached few-cycle area, surface damage behaviors can reflect the initial light-electron interaction. In this work, we employed an ultrashort laser source to investigate damage behavior on solid. We investigate the potential of the multi-plate medium to generate broad supercontinuum and few-cycle pulses from a relatively high peak and average power Yb solid-state laser source in a single-pass double-stage multi-plate supercontinuum setup. The experiments were performed by focusing the output from a Yb3+: KGW regenerative amplifier, producing pulses from energy of 600mJ(1kHz) and a duration of 170 fs(~5ps tunable), through a set of thin fused silica plates with individual thicknesses of 1mm to 2mm. This resulted in pulse width of 15fs-25fs (4 cycles-7 cycles) continuous tunable laser source to investigate the laser-induced damage behavior of ZnSe and Fused silica. The damage mechanism and damage threshold are explained in the context of the Keldysh theory and critical electron density.