Dispersion management of the SULF front end

Abstract

To manage dispersion of the front end in the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF), which is a large-scale project aimed at delivering 10 PW laser pulses, a stretcher based on a combination of a grating and a prism (grism) pair is inserted between an Öffner-triplet-type stretcher and a regenerative amplifier to reduce high-order dispersion introduced by optical materials at the amplification stage. The alignment of the grism pair is implemented by controlling the far-field pattern of the output beam of the grism pair. The energy of the front end reaches up to 7 J at a 1-Hz repetition rate. Experimental results show that the pulse duration can be compressed to 22.4 fs and the spectral distortion over the spectrum is less than 2.25 rad.