Recent progress towards a petawatt power using optical parametric chirped pulse amplification

We present experimental results on the optical parametric chirped pulse amplification and compression of femtosecond pulses. Chirped pulses with spectral width 70 nm were amplified in a three-stage optical parametric amplifier system up to 35 J. The measured amplified pulsewidth after compression was 85 fs indicating a potential peak power of over 0.35 PW.