High-Contrast, High-Intensity Petawatt-Class Laser and Applications

Abstract

A high-contrast high-intensity petawatt-class Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification laser has been developed for research on high field science. A saturable absorber and a low-gain optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification preamplifier in the front-end have improved the temporal contrast in the system to ∼ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math>$2 \times 10^{12}$</tex-math></inline-formula> on the subnanosecond time scale at the ∼70 TW power level. In addition to the high-contrast broadband high-energy output from the final amplifier has been achieved with a flat-top spatial profile with a filling factor of ∼70%. This is the result of pump beam spatial profile homogenization with diffractive optical elements. The system produces the uncompressed output pulse energy of 29 J, indicating the capability for reaching a peak power of ∼600 TW. We discuss in detail the design, performance, and characterization of the laser including output power, pulse duration, and spatiotemporal beam quality. We also describe the on-going upgrade of the laser system and some applications for the laser in relativistic dominated laser–matter interactions.