PETAL laser beam modeling

Abstract

We present a complete modeling of the PETAL [1] laser chain, including associated diagnostics with the Miro code. We show that the software is able to model most relevant physical aspects of the petawatt PETAL laser chain in the subpicosecond regime, from the front-end to the focal spot in a broadband regime. Precise gain and loss values of the amplifier section have been obtained with experimental measurement of the amplifier both in monochromatic and broadband regime in the energy range 200J-4.8kJ. For the compression stages, segmentation, propagation and recombination of the four beams are considered with respect to the phase delay between the gratings. The reconstructed pulse from experimental data’s was obtained by taking into account the transfer functions of each diagnostics, including non-linear effects, and confirmed the calculated compressed pulse properties.