Direct regenerative amplification of femtosecond pulses to the multimillijoule level.

We present a compact femtosecond nonlinear Yb:YAG thin-disk regenerative amplifier delivering pulses carried at a wavelength of 1030 nm with an average power of >200 Wat a repetition rate of 100 kHz and an energy noise value of 0.46% (rms) in a beam with a propagation factor of M-2 < 1.4. The amplifier is seeded with bandwidth-limited subpicosecond pulses without temporal stretching. We give estimates for the nonlinear parameters influencing the system and show that chirped mirrors compress the 2 mJ pulses to a near-bandwidth-limited duration of 210 fs. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America