Investigation of materials for supercontinuum generation for subsequent nonlinear parametrical and Raman amplification at 1 MHz repetition rate

In the present work we performed research of supercontinuum generation in several commonly used and new supercontinuum generation crystals for subsequent nonlinear amplification, using 1-3 mu J energy pulses of 300 fs duration at 1 MHz repetition rate. Obtained supercontinuum spectra spanning over 480-1950 nm wavelength range at pump pulse energies as low as 200nJ in KGW and YVO4 crystals. We present simple experimental setups of stimulated Raman amplification and optical parametric amplification using supercontinuum seeds obtained from several selected crystals. We achieved total energy conversion efficiencies up to 9% both for optical parametric amplification setup and for stimulated Raman amplification setups. The optical parametric amplifier was tunable in the 680-980 nm spectral range and produced ultrashort pulses of 23-44 fs duration. Raman amplifier produced more than 130 mW average power at 1194 nm wavelength and featured broadened spectrum corresponding to Fourier transform limited similar to 100 fs pulse duration. We demonstrated that low power and low energy femtosecond lasers could be efficiently employed for the nonlinear wavelength conversion.