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The generation of 0.5 mJ femtosecond laser pulses by coherent combining of two high power high energy fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers is reported. The system is running at a repetition frequency of 175 kHz producing 88 W of average power after the compressor unit. Polarizing beam splitters have been used to realize an amplifying Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which has been stabilized with a Hänsch-Couillaud measurement system. The stabilized system possesses a measured residual rms phase difference fluctuation between the two branches as low as λ/70 rad at the maximum power level. The experiment proves that coherent addition of femtosecond fiber lasers can be efficiently and reliably performed at high B-integral and considerable thermal load in the individual amplifiers.

We report on a high power optical parametric amplifier delivering 8 fs pulses with 6 GW peak power. The system is pumped by a fiber amplifier and operated at 96 kHz repetition rate. The average output power is as high as 6.7 W, which is the highest average power few-cycle pulse laser reported so far. When stabilizing the seed oscillator, the system delivered carrier-envelop phase stable laser pulses. Furthermore, high harmonic generation up to the 33(th) order (21.8 nm) is demonstrated in a Krypton gas jet. In addition, the scalability of the presented laser system is discussed.

Using phase shaping, the impact of the Kerr effect in a fiber-based chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system is experimentally controlled. The technique is based on an analytical model describing the spectral phase owing to self-phase modulation in CPA systems. The method relies neither on complex phase measurements nor on time-consuming optimization routines. Nearly transform-limited pulses with energies as high as 1 mJ are produced, and a B integral being as high as 8 rad is accumulated in the main amplifier. The value of the B integral is determined by the method itself.

We experimentally demonstrate compensation of the impact of Kerr-nonlinearity with positive dispersion in chirped-pulse systems. The condition for the phase-compensation is derived and design guidelines are presented. The technique is shown with a fiber-based system employing conventional diffraction gratings as well in a system that is based on chirped volume Bragg-gratings. Practical requirements on the stretching unit are discussed.

It is analytically shown that weak initial spectral phase modulations cause a pulse-contrast degradation at the output of nonlinear chirped-pulse amplification systems. The Kerr-nonlinearity causes an energy-transfer from the main pulse to side-pulses during nonlinear amplification. The relative intensities of these side-pulses can be described in terms of Bessel-functions. It is shown that the intensities of the pulses are dependent on the magnitude of the accumulated nonlinear phase-shift (i.e., the B-integral), the depth and period of the initial spectral phase-modulation and the slope of the linear stretching chirp. The results are applicable to any type of laser amplifier that is based on the technique of chirped-pulse amplification. The analytical results presented in this paper are of particular importance for high peak-power laser applications requiring high pulse-contrasts, e.g. high field physics.