Ultrafast femtosecond laser system with hundreds of microjoules of energy, operating at a repetition frequency of several kilohertz, has very important applications in many fields such as medicine, mid-infrared laser generation, industrial processing, and vibrational spectroscopy. The chirped pulse amplification technique provides a feasible path to obtain light sources with those parameters. However, the use of chirped pulse amplification increases the technical complexity and cost of the laser system. Recently, the proposal of a multi-pass cell (MPC) nonlinear pulse compression technique has enabled us to obtain high power ultrafast femtosecond pulses with reduced technical complexity and cost. The device requires only two concave mirrors and a nonlinear medium in between. In the past seven years, the multi-pass cell nonlinear pulse compression technique has made great progress, making it possible to obtain ultrashort pulses with average power of more than a few kW and peak power of tens to hundreds of TW.

In this work, we achieve nonlinear pulse compression of a 100-W picosecond laser by using an improved nonlinear pulse compression scheme that combines a hybrid of a plano-cancave multi-pass cell and multi-thin-plate. Using fused silica plates in plano-cancave cavity, the spectral bandwidth (FWHM) of input picosecond laser is broadened from 0.24 nm to 4.8 nm due to self-phase modulation effect, the pulse is compressed to 483 fs by dispersion compensation using grating pairs, which corresponds to a compression factor of 22, and the final output power of 44.2 W is obtained. Compared with traditional MPC, the plano-cancave cavity scheme we developed is a very promising solution for nonlinear compression due to its compactness, more stability and large compression ratio.