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Optical rectification with tilted pulse fronts in lithium niobate crystals is one of the most promising methods to generate terahertz (THz) radiation. In order to achieve higher optical-to-THz energy efficiency, it is necessary to cryogenically cool the crystal not only to decrease the linear phonon absorption for the generated THz wave but also to lengthen the effective interaction length between infrared pump pulses and THz waves. However, the refractive index of lithium niobate crystal at lower temperature is not the same as that at room temperature, resulting in the necessity to re-optimize or even re-build the tilted pulse front setup. Here, we performed a temperature dependent measurement of refractive index and absorption coefficient on a 6.0 mol% MgO-doped congruent lithium niobate wafer by using a THz time-domain spectrometer (THz-TDS). When the crystal temperature was decreased from 300 K to 50 K, the refractive index of the crystal in the extraordinary polarization decreased from 5.05 to 4.88 at 0.4 THz, resulting in ~1° change for the tilt angle inside the lithium niobate crystal. The angle of incidence on the grating for the tilted pulse front setup at 1030 nm with demagnification factor of -0.5 needs to be changed by 3°. The absorption coefficient decreased by 60% at 0.4 THz. These results are crucial for designing an optimum tilted pulse front setup based on lithium niobate crystals.

A cryogenic composite-thin-disk amplifier with amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) rejection is implemented that overcomes traditional laser system problems in high-energy pulsed laser drivers of high average power. A small signal gain of 8 dB was compared to a 1.5 dB gain for an uncapped thin-disk without ASE mitigation under identical pumping conditions. A strict image relayed 12-pass architecture using an off-axis vacuum telescope and polarization switching extracted 100 mJ at 250 Hz in high beam quality stretched 700 ps pulses of 0.6-nm bandwidth.

A model for terahertz (THz) generation by optical rectification using tilted-pulse-fronts is developed. It simultaneously accounts for in two spatial dimensions (2-D) (i) the spatio-temporal variations of the optical pump pulse imparted by the tilted-pulse-front setup, (ii) the nonlinear coupled interaction of THz and optical radiation, (iii) self-phase modulation and (iv) stimulated Raman scattering. The model is validated by quantitative agreement with experiments and analytic calculations. We show that the optical pump beam is significantly broadened in the transverse-momentum (kx) domain as a consequence of its spectral broadening due to THz generation. In the presence of this large frequency and transverse-momentum (or angular) spread, group velocity dispersion causes a spatio-temporal break-up of the optical pump pulse which inhibits further THz generation. The implications of these effects on energy scaling and optimization of optical-to-THz conversion efficiency are discussed. This suggests the use of optical pump pulses with elliptical beam profiles for large optical pump energies. Furthermore, it is seen that optimization of the setup is highly dependent on optical pump conditions. Trade-offs in optimizing the optical-to-THz conversion efficiency on the spatial and spectral properties of THz radiation are discussed to guide the development of such sources.

Terahertz (THz) generation by optical rectification (OR) using tilted-pulse-fronts is studied. A one-dimensional (1-D) model which simultaneously accounts for (i) the nonlinear coupled interaction of the THz and optical radiation, (ii) angular and material dispersion, (iii) absorption, iv) self-phase modulation and (v) stimulated Raman scattering is presented. We numerically show that the large experimentally observed cascaded frequency down-shift and spectral broadening (cascading effects) of the optical pump pulse is a direct consequence of THz generation. In the presence of this large spectral broadening, the large angular dispersion associated with tilted-pulse-fronts which is ~15-times larger than material dispersion, accentuates phase mismatch and degrades THz generation. Consequently, this cascading effect in conjunction with angular dispersion is shown to be the strongest limitation to THz generation in lithium niobate for pumping at 1 µm. It is seen that the exclusion of these cascading effects in modeling OR, leads to a significant overestimation of the optical-to-THz conversion efficiency. The results are verified with calculations based on a 2-D spatial model. The simulation results are supported by experiments.

We demonstrate highly efficient terahertz (THz) generation by optical rectification (OR) of near-optimum pump pulses centered at 1.03 μm in cryogenically cooled lithium niobate. Using a close to optimal pulse duration of 680 fs and a pump energy of 1.2 mJ, we report conversion efficiencies above 3.8±0.4%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than previously reported. The results confirm the advantage of using cryogenic cooling of the lithium niobate crystal that significantly reduces the THz absorption, enabling the scaling of THz pulse energies to the millijoule level via OR.

Beam steering at high speed and high power is demonstrated from a 6-element optical phased array using coherent beam combining (CBC) techniques. The steering speed, defined as the inverse of the time to required to sweep the beam across the steering range, is 40 MHz and the total power is 396 mW. The measured central lobe FWHM width is 565 μrad. High on-axis intensity is maintained periodically by phase-locking the array via a stochastic-parallel-gradient-descent (SPGD) algorithm. A master-oscillator-power-amplifier (MOPA) configuration is used where the amplifier array elements are semiconductor slab-coupled-optical-waveguide-amplifiers (SCOWAs). The beam steering is achieved by LiNbO(3) phase modulators; the phase-locking occurs by current adjustment of the SCOWAs. The system can be readily scaled to GHz steering speed and multiwatt-class output.