Design principles for ultrafast thin-disk regenerative amplifiers without conventional stretcher

We present design principles for ultrafast Yb:KYW thin-disk amplifiers providing ultrashort pulses with high energies at high repetition rates. Without using a conventional stretcher, 10 /spl mu/J, 300 fs pulses were generated at 200 kHz repetition rate. Using the dispersive stretching of the pulses during amplification renders the effort of a complex chirped pulse amplification setup unnecessary.