Cross-polarized supercontinuum generation in LiNbO3 for a multi-mJ waveform synthesizer

Availability of high energy, light transients with engineerable electric field in time, open the doors for exploring new regimes in extreme light-mater interaction and is currently one of the most interesting frontiers of ultrafast optics [1]. The current approach to generate high-energy, light transients is based on combining the concepts of waveform synthesis and optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers (OPCPA) [1, 2, 3]. In sequential OPCPA-based synthesizers, different spectral region of a superoctave spectrum are amplified in different amplification stages pumped by different harmonics of the pump laser, without splitting the seed [4]. In parallel scheme, a superoctave seed is divided to several spectral regions and temporally combined after their amplification in parallel OPCPA stages [1, 2, 3]. However, the present challenges in these approaches are obtaining a fs-scale timing synchronization between pump and seed pulses in the OPCPA stages (in both schemes) and a tight stabilization of the relative phases between the different channels (in the parallel scheme) in order to achieve a reproducible light transient.