Chirped pulse amplification

Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) is a technique for amplifying an ultrashort laser pulse up to the petawatt level, with the laser pulse being stretched out temporally and spectrally, then amplified, and then compressed again. The stretching and compression uses devices that ensure that the different color components of the pulse travel different distances.

CPA for lasers was introduced by Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou at the University of Rochester in the mid-1980s, work for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.

CPA is the technique used by most high-powered lasers in the world.

Before the introduction of CPA in the mid-1980s, the peak power of laser pulses was limited because a laser pulse at intensities of gigawatts per square centimeter causes serious damage to the gain medium through nonlinear processes such as self-focusing. For example, some of the most powerful compressed CPA laser beams, even in an unfocused large aperture (after exiting the compression grating) can exceed intensities of 700 GW/cm², which if allowed to propagate in air or the laser gain medium would instantly self-focus and form a plasma or cause filament propagation, both of which would ruin the original beam's desirable qualities and could even cause back-reflection potentially damaging the laser's components. In order to keep the intensity of laser pulses below the threshold of the nonlinear effects, the laser systems had to be large and expensive, and the peak power of laser pulses was limited to the high gigawatt level or terawatt level for very large multi-beam facilities.

In CPA, on the other hand, an ultrashort laser pulse is stretched out in time prior to introducing it to the gain medium using a pair of gratings that are arranged so that the low-frequency component of the laser pulse travels a shorter path than the high-frequency component does. After going through the grating pair, the laser pulse becomes positively chirped, that is, the high-frequency component lags behind the low-frequency component, and has longer pulse duration than the original by a factor of 1000 to 100000.

Then the stretched pulse, whose intensity is sufficiently low compared with the intensity limit of gigawatts per square centimeter, is safely introduced to the gain medium and amplified by a factor of a million or more. Finally, the amplified laser pulse is recompressed back to the original pulse width through reversal of the process of stretching, achieving orders-of-magnitude higher peak power than laser systems could generate before the invention of CPA.

In addition to the higher peak power, CPA makes it possible to miniaturize laser systems (the compressor being the biggest part). A compact high-power laser, known as a tabletop terawatt laser (T³ laser, typically delivering 1 joule of energy within 1 picosecond), can be created based on the CPA technique.

There are several ways to construct compressors and stretchers. However, a typical Ti:sapphire-based chirped-pulse amplifier requires that the pulses are stretched to several hundred picoseconds, which means that the different wavelength components must experience about 10 cm difference in path length. The most practical way to achieve this is with grating-based stretchers and compressors. Stretchers and compressors are characterized by their dispersion. With negative dispersion, light with higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) takes less time to travel through the device than light with lower frequencies (longer wavelengths). With positive dispersion, it is the other way around. In a CPA, the dispersions of the stretcher and compressor must cancel out. Because of practical considerations, the (high-power) compressor is usually designed with negative dispersion, and the (low-power) stretcher is therefore designed with positive dispersion.