Nonlinear beam matching to gas-filled multipass cells

Abstract : Gas-filled multipass cells are an appealing alternative to capillaries to implement nonlinear temporal compression of high energy femtosecond lasers. Here, we provide an analytic expression for stationary beam coupling to multipass cells that takes into account nonlinear propagation. This allows a constant beam size on the mirrors and at the cell waist, thereby making the optical design more accurate, for example to avoid optical damage or significant ionization. The analysis is validated using spatio-temporal numerical simulations of the propagation in a near-concentric configuration. This is particularly important for multipass cells that are operated in a highly nonlinear regime, which is the current trend since it allows a lower number of roundtrips, relaxing the constraint on mirror coatings performance.