High power femtosecond driving lasers

The FAST laser system has two stages. The first stage operates at 1 kHz. It is a home-built multipass chirped pulse amplifier centered at 800 nm. The pulses directly from the amplifier are 4 mJ, 25 fs. After the hollow-core fiber compressor, the pulses are be shortened to 5 fs with 2 mJ energy. Both the output power and the carrier-envelope phase can be stabilized for generating isolated attosecond pulses. It is used to produce nJ level attosecond pulses for conducting XUV-IR pump-probe experiments.

The second stage of the FAST power amplifier. It will produce 15 fs, 150 mJ pulses at 10 Hz for demonstrating scaling of attosecond pulse energy. The goal is to achieve 1 μJ isolated attosecond pulse for performing XUV pump XUV probe experiments.