Wei Xiaohong, Qian Liejia, Yuan Peng, Zhu Heyuan, Fan Dianyuan
State Key Laboratory for Advanced Photonic Materials and Devices, Department of Optical Science and Engineering, Advanced Materials Laboratory, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
Opt Express. 2008 Jun 9;16(12):8904-15. doi: 10.1364/oe.16.008904.
In this paper we theoretically study the spatial characteristics of optical parametric amplification (OPA) or chirped pulse OPA (OPCPA) pumped with a phase-aberrated beam. Due to the fact that pump-to-signal phase transfer caused by walk-off effect is highly gain-dependent, in a high gain OPA system the signal beam-quality will be significantly degraded even for a weak walk-off, accompanied with beam tilting and converging or diverging. It is demonstrated that an OPA configuration with walkoff-compensated crystal pair is capable of reducing the phase transfer and hence ensuring signal beam-quality, which may be of importance for designing high-energy OPCPA systems.
