High-brightness femtosecond laser using titanium-sapphire technology and amplification in dyes

We modify a conventional picosecond dye-amplifier system to achieve maximum brightness for 100-fs pulses derived from a titanium-sapphire oscillator. We obtain near transform-limited 4-GW pulses by using efficient chirped-pulse amplification and compression based on a prism-pair stretcher and a glass-block compressor. Good beam quality and minimum beam divergence are obtained with a Bethune cell final amplifier. The system is shown to be capable of generating beam brightness in excess of 2 × 10(7) W cm(-2) sr(-1), within a factor of 2 of that expected for a diffraction-limited beam.