Abstract
Optical Parametric Amplifiers (OPAs) are nonlinear optical devices allowing the generation of widely tunable ultrashort pulses, and also providing, if suitably designed, very broad gain bandwidths. This chapter reviews the principles of ultrashort pulse OPAs, focusing in particular on the generation of few-optical-cycle pulses. We start by introducing the formalism describing the propagation of an ultrashort pulse in a nonlinear medium; we subsequently develop the theory of OPAs, first in the limit of monochromatic waves, and then for the case of ultrashort pulses. We describe in detail the OPA architecture and give a few examples of experimental setups, with particular emphasis on ultra-broadband OPA schemes for the generation of few-optical-cycle pulses. Finally, we discuss the use of OPAs for the generation of pulses with a constant carrier-envelope phase and the application of the chirped pulse amplification concept to OPAs.
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Cerullo, G., Brida, D. (2013). Ultra-Broadband Optical Parametric Amplifiers. In: Thomson, R., Leburn, C., Reid, D. (eds) Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics. Scottish Graduate Series. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00017-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00017-6_2
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