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The problem

Lasers do all sorts of cool things in research and in applications, and there are many good reasons for it, including their coherence, frequency stability, and controllability, but for some applications, the thing that really matters is raw power.

As a simple example, it had long been understood that if the intensity of light gets high enough, then the assumption of linearity that underpins much of classical optics would break down, and nonlinear optical phenomena like second-harmonic generation would become available, getting light to do all sorts of interesting things. Using incoherent light sources, the required intensities are prohibitively high, but once the laser was invented, it took only one year until the first demonstration of second-harmonic generation, and a few short years after that until third-harmonic generation, a third-order nonlinear process that requires even higher intensities.

Put another way, power matters, and the more intensity you have available, the wider a range of nonlinear optical phenomena will be open for exploration. Because of this, a large fraction of laser science has been focused on increasing the available intensities, generally using pulsed lasers to achieve this and with notable milestones being Q-switching and mode-locking.

However, if you try to push onward with a bigger laser amplifier and more and more power, you are basically destined sooner or later to hit a brick wall, rather brusquely, in the form of catastrophic self-focusing. This is a consequence of yet another nonlinear effect, the Kerr effect, happening inside the laser medium itself. At face value, the Kerr effect looks harmless enough: basically, it says that if the intensity is high enough, the refractive index of the material will rise slightly, in proportion to the intensity: $$ n(I) = n_0 + n_2\: I. $$ So, what's the big deal? In short, if you have a laser beam propagating through such a medium, then

the intensity of the light will be higher in the center, which means that the refractive index will be higher in the center.

In other words, the material's optical properties will look like those of a convex lens, and it will tend to focus the beam.

This will tend to make the beam sharper, which will increase the intensity at the center, which will raise the refractive index at the center even higher...

... which will then focus the beam even more tightly, leading to higher and higher intensities.

This makes up a positive feedback loop, and if the initial intensity is high enough, the medium is long enough, and there isn't enough initial diffraction to counteract it, then it will spiral out of control and cause catastrophic laser-induced damage in the very medium that you're trying to use to amplify that laser beam. (Moreover, it is quite common, particularly in air, that the laser will diffract on the damaged spot and then re-self-focus a bit further down the line, a phenomenon known as laser filamentation. If you get things just right wrong, this can propagate a failure in the gain medium up to the destruction of an entire beamline.)

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This sounds like a funky mechanism, but it was a huge roadblock for a very long time. If you plot the highest laser intensity available at different times since the invention of the laser, it climbs quickly up during the sixties, and then it hits a wall and stays put for some ten to fifteen years:

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This represents the barrier of Kerr-lens self-focusing, and at the time the only way to overcome it was to build a laser which was physically bigger, to dilute the intensity over more gain medium to try to prevent the problem. Until, that is, Chirped Pulse Amplification came around to solve the problem.

The solution

At its core, Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) works by diluting the light, so that it can be amplified to a larger total power without reaching a dangerous intensity, but it does this stretching in time, i.e. longitudinally along the laser pulse.

The basic sequence consists of four steps:

First of all, you start with a short laser pulse that you want to amplify You then stretch it in time, by introducing chirp into the signal: that is, you use some sort of dispersive element, like a prism or a diffraction grating, which decomposes the pulse into all of its constituent colors and sends the longer wavelengths first and the shorter wavelengths last. This will naturally reduce the intensity of the pulse. (Why "chirp"? because the upward (or downward) sweep of frequencies over the pulse is precisely what gives bird chirps their characteristic sound.) You then pass this lower-intensity pulse through your laser amplifier, which is safe because the instantaneous intensity is below the self-focusing damage threshold of your gain medium. Finally, you pass your pulse through a reversed set of gratings which will undo the relative delay between the longer- and shorter-wavelengths of your pulse, putting them all together into a single pulse of the same shape and length as your original pulse... ... but at the much higher amplified power, and at intensities which would be impossible to achieve safely using direct amplification of the pulse.

The core feature that makes the method tick is the fact that, when done correctly, the stretching of the pulse will completely conserve the coherence between the different frequency components, which means that it is fully reversible and when you add a cancelling chirp the pulse will go back to its initial shape.

Furthermore, the method relies on the fact that stimulated emission will completely duplicate, in a coherent way, the photons that it is amplifying, which means that the photons that are introduced by the amplification will have the same frequency and phase characteristics as the initial pulse, which means that when you remove the chirp from the amplified pulse the added-in photons will also compress into a tight envelope.

Applications

Like I said at the beginning, CPA is particularly useful in places where raw laser power, and particularly concentrated laser power, is of paramount importance. Here are some examples:

Further reading

Some additional resources for further reading: