Spatial mode cleaning and efficient nonlinear pulse compression to sub-50 fs in a gas-filled multipass cell

Abstract

We demonstrate a gas-filled multipass cell (MPC) that cleaned the spatial mode of a spatial-filter-free 250 W, 100 kHz, 445 fs driven source based on an Innoslab amplifier and compressed the pulse duration to 41 fs simultaneously. The multipass cell acted as a spatial filter and benefited from its discrete waveguide nature, in which the input beam quality factor M2 was improved from 1.53 to a near-diffraction-limited value of 1.21 at 96% transmission.