Intracavity stretcher for chirped-pulse amplification in high-power laser systems

We present pulse stretching with an intracavity Offner-type pulse stretcher applied to a high-energy, short-pulse laser system. The compact intracavity design, offering a tunable stretching factor, allows the pulses to be stretched to several nanoseconds and, at the same time, to be amplified to 100 μJ. The stretched pulses have been further amplified with the high-power laser system Polaris and have been recompressed to durations as short as 102 fs, reaching peak powers of 100 TW. Furthermore, the temporal intensity contrast is investigated and compared to the formerly used stretcher setup.