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Published on: April 25, 2019
Enhancement of filamentation postcompression by astigmatic focusing
Benjamín Alonso1, Rocío Borrego-Varillas, Íñigo J Sola
1Grupo de Investigación en Óptica Extrema (GIOE), Universidad de Salamanca, Pl. Merced s/n, Salamanca E-37008, Spain. b.alonso@usal.es
Abstract:
The energy scaling up of pulse postcompression is still an open issue. In this work we analyze the use of astigmatic focusing to improve the output pulses in a filamentation based postcompression setup. Unlike spherical conditions, astigmatic focusing enhances the output energy and the spectral broadening of the filament. This is due to the increase of critical power, allowing a considerable improvement of the postcompression energy and stability in a simple way. We demonstrated compression from FWHM 100 fs, 10 nm, 3 mJ input pulses to 13 fs, 142 nm, near 1 mJ pulses.
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