Abstract
Optical damages, which severely degrade the output energy performance of Nd:glass regenerative amplifiers, are discussed in detail in this paper. By a series of experiments, it has been confirmed that these damages result from laser-induced contamination. Based on this work, several improvements are made to boost output energy performance of the regenerative amplifier. The output energy of the regenerative amplifier after improvements declines 4% after 1000 h of operation, much less than it used to, 60% after 560 h of operation.
Highlights
High-power laser facilities like National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the United States, Shenguang (SG) series laser facilities in China, and Laser Megajoule (LMJ) in France are designed to create the ignition of a deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion target in a laboratory setting[1,2,3]
We have developed an Nd:glass diode-pumped regenerative amplifier, which has been used in the SG-II laser facility since 2009
The aperture stop was illuminated by ghost beams from PBS3 and QWP1, which might produce aerosols near the Pockels cell (PC) which led to laser induced contamination (LIC) on window glass (WG) surface of PC
Summary
High-power laser facilities like National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the United States, Shenguang (SG) series laser facilities in China, and Laser Megajoule (LMJ) in France are designed to create the ignition of a deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion target in a laboratory setting[1,2,3]. To our knowledge, this is a common problem for most high-power solid-state lasers and is the most severe challenge to apply them in large laser systems. In order to investigate which results in damages on surfaces of optical components, LID or LIC, three experiments listed below were carried out
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