Nonlinear temporal pulse cleaning of a 1-μm optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification system

Abstract : We demonstrate the technique of cross-polarized wave (XPW) generation at 1 μm with a 310-fs optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification system at the millijoule level. We show an improvement of the temporal contrast by three orders of magnitude with an energy transmission of 22%. Additionally, we report that XPW generation preserves the beam spatial quality and shortens the pulse duration by a factor of 3^1/2, resulting in a peak power transmission of ∼35%.