Tunable few-optical-cycle pulses with passive carrier-envelope phase stabilization from an optical parametric amplifier

The authors report on a scheme for the generation of few-optical-cycle pulses broadly tunable in the visible with passively stabilized carrier-envelope phase (CEP). The system starts with an infrared optical parametric amplifier in which both pump and seed are derived from an amplified, non-CEP-stabilized Ti:sapphire laser. The passively stabilized idler beam is then spectrally broadened through white-light generation and seeds a blue-pumped noncollinear optical parametric amplifier. The system produces few-optical-cycle pulses tunable from 500 to 800 nm, with energy up to 5 mu J and 0.23 rad rms CEP fluctuations. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.