Abstract
A high-power, Joule-class, nanosecond temporally shaped multi-pass ring laser amplifier system with two neodymium-doped phosphate glass (Nd:glass) laser heads is demonstrated. The laser amplifier system consists of three parts: an all-fiber structure seeder, a diode-pumped Nd:glass regenerative amplifier and a multi-pass ring amplifier, where the thermally induced depolarization of two laser heads is studied experimentally and theoretically. Following the injection of a square pulse with the pulse energy of 0.9 mJ and pulse width of 6 ns, a 0.969-J high-energy laser pulse at 1 Hz was generated, which had the ability to change the waveform arbitrarily, based on the all-fiber structure front end. The experimental results show that the proposed laser system is promising to be adopted in the preamplifier of high-power laser facilities.
Highlights
With increasing demand for scientific research and engineering applications in space communication, laser marking and laser material processing, Joule-class laser sources with high gain and energy have been receiving increasing attention
With the multi-pass ring laser system, 0.969 J laser pulse energy and 1000× amplification were achieved for 0.9 mJ injected pulse energy
The energy stability during 2 h was 2.5%, while the laser system was approximately operated in the saturated regime of the gain medium
Summary
With increasing demand for scientific research and engineering applications in space communication, laser marking and laser material processing, Joule-class laser sources with high gain and energy have been receiving increasing attention. As seed sources in the laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF), these preamplifiers are used as boost amplifiers of front-end systems in highpower laser systems, or petawatt pump source systems In such systems, the gain medium in the main amplifier is always neodymium-doped phosphate glass (Nd:glass), which has excellent optical homogeneity, high doping concentration and flexible geometry[4, 5]. The preamplifier that is used in Omega-EP, CLARA, has two 25.4-mm-diameter Nd:YLF rods, and for each rod, one end is polished to compensate for the transmitted wave-front errors[6, 12] These amplifiers use Nd:YLF as the gain medium, and Nd:YLF crystals are restricted by the geometry and optical quality of the crystal grown[4]. The proposed multi-pass ring amplifier is promising to be adopted in preamplifiers of high-power laser facilities in the future
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