Abstract
The rapid development of the optical-cycle-level ultra-fast laser technologies may break through the bottleneck of the traditional ultra-intense laser [i.e., Petawatt (PW, 1015 W) laser currently] and enable the generation of even higher peak-power/intensity lasers. Herein, we simulate an ultra-broadband concept for the realization of an Exawatt-class (EW, 1018 W) high peak-power laser, where the wide-angle non-collinear optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (WNOPCPA) is combined with the thin-plate post-compression. A frequency-chirped carrier-envelope-phase stable super-continuum laser is amplified to high-energy in WNOPCPA by pumping with two pump-beamlets and injected into the thin-plate post-compression to generate a sub-optical-cycle high-energy laser pulse. The numerical simulation shows this hybrid concept significantly enhances the gain bandwidth in the high-energy amplifier and the spectral broadening in the post-compression. By using this concept, a study of a prototype design of a 0.5 EW system is presented, and several key challenges are also examined.
Highlights
The rapid development of the optical-cycle-level ultra-fast laser technologies may break through the bottleneck of the traditional ultra-intense laser [i.e., Petawatt (PW, 1015 W) laser currently] and enable the generation of even higher peak-power/intensity lasers
A temporal contrast improvement device, e.g. a cross-polarized wave (XPW) device, could be installed for generating an ultra-clean seed pulse[50,51]. This broad-band nanosecond pulse is sent to the wideangle non-collinear optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (WNOPCPA) amplification chain as the signal beam for optical parametric amplification
Using the spectra and spectral phases of the pulses after propagation in a 0.5 mm-thick fused silica shown in Fig. 6b for optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) (1358 J) and in Fig. 6d for WNOPCPA (971 J), we have evaluated the peak-powers of the compressed pulses by varying group velocity dispersion (GVD), with the results shown in Fig. 7a(i),b(i), respectively
Summary
The rapid development of the optical-cycle-level ultra-fast laser technologies may break through the bottleneck of the traditional ultra-intense laser [i.e., Petawatt (PW, 1015 W) laser currently] and enable the generation of even higher peak-power/intensity lasers. We simulate an ultra-broadband concept for the realization of an Exawatt-class (EW, 1018 W) high peak-power laser, where the wideangle non-collinear optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (WNOPCPA) is combined with the thin-plate post-compression. A frequency-chirped carrier-envelope-phase stable super-continuum laser is amplified to high-energy in WNOPCPA by pumping with two pump-beamlets and injected into the thin-plate post-compression to generate a sub-optical-cycle high-energy laser pulse. As the step to the EW-class laser, Fig. 1a shows two approaches that can be considered; one is to increase the pulse energy, and the other is to reduce the pulse duration The former approach is strongly dependent on developing large-sized laser amplification materials (especially Ti:sapphire and nonlinear optical crystals) or increasing the beamline number (facility scale). Mourou et al in order to generate few-cycle, PW and even EW
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