Watt-level optical parametric amplifier at 42 MHz tunable from 135 to 45 μm coherently seeded with solitons

We report on an optical parametric amplifier at high repetition rate of 41.7 MHz seeded by an optical soliton from a tapered fiber. Gap-free signal tuning from 1.35 μm to 1.95 μm with corresponding idler wavelengths from 2.2 μm to 4.5 μm is demonstrated. The system provides up to 1.8 W average power at 1.4 μm, more than 1.1 W up to 1.7 μm, and more than 400 mW up to 4.0 μm with a signal pulse duration of 200 to 300 fs. It is directly pumped by a solid-state oscillator providing up to 7.4 W at 1.04 μm wavelength with 425 fs pulse duration. Soliton-seeding is shown to lead to excellent pulse-to-pulse stability, but it introduces a timing-jitter on the millisecond timescale. Using a two-stage concept the timing-jitter is efficiently suppressed due to the passive synchronization of both conversion stages.