Abstract
AbstractThe design and the early commissioning of the ELI-Beamlines laser facility’s 30 J, 30 fs, 10 Hz HAPLS (High-repetition-rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System) beam transport (BT) system to the P3 target chamber are described in detail. It is the world’s first and with 54 m length, the longest distance high average power petawatt (PW) BT system ever built. It connects the HAPLS pulse compressor via the injector periscope with the 4.5 m diameter P3 target chamber of the plasma physics group in hall E3. It is the largest target chamber of the facility and was connected first to the BT system. The major engineering challenges are the required high vibration stability mirror support structures, the high pointing stability optomechanics as well as the required levels for chemical and particle cleanliness of the vacuum vessels to preserve the high laser damage threshold of the dielectrically coated high-power mirrors. A first commissioning experiment at low pulse energy shows the full functionality of the BT system to P3 and the novel experimental infrastructure.
Highlights
New high-intensity laser facilities around the world[1,2,3,4] based on chirped pulse amplification (CPA)[5] have revolutionized both our understanding and use of plasma physics
To assess whether the 10 times higher laser damage threshold (LDT) shown in Figure 17 is a sufficiently high margin to avoid catastrophic damage of the beam transport (BT) and focusing optics when building a non-relay imaged BT system, we have developed in close cooperation with LightTrans International in Jena, Germany, a VirtualLab Fusion[35,36] model to calculate the full-bandwidth diffraction propagation of HAPLS to each experimental hall
Despite the very long propagation distances reaching 100 m for the E5 hall it was demonstrated that the BT system contributes with less than 1 μrad RMS to the on-target beam pointing stability
Summary
New high-intensity laser facilities around the world[1,2,3,4] based on chirped pulse amplification (CPA)[5] have revolutionized both our understanding and use of plasma physics. This paper focuses on the beam transport (BT) system of the HAPLS to P3 only as it is the first, which became fully operational in the E3 experimental hall at the end of 2019. The HAPLS laser BT system of ELIBeamlines will guide in the future the 30 J, 30 fs compressed pulses under vacuum to the other three experimental halls E2, E4 and E5 over distances of up to 100 m and via three switchyards.
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