Abstract
Abstract The input pulse of the laser PEARL with energy of 18 J and pulse duration of about 60 fs was compressed to 10 fs after passage through a 4-mm-thick KDP crystal and reflection at two chirped mirrors with sum dispersion of −200 fs2. The experiments were performed for the В-integral values from 5 to 19 without visible damage to the optical elements, which indicates that small-scale self-focusing is not a significant issue. It was shown that, by virtue of the low dispersion of the group velocity, the KDP crystal has some advantages over silica: a larger pulse compression coefficient, especially at a small value of the В-integral (B = 5, …, 9), lower absolute values of chirped mirror dispersion, and also a possibility to control the magnitude of nonlinearity and dispersion by changing crystal orientation.
Highlights
The power and, the focal intensity of petawatt and multipetawatt lasers are currently limited by the size and damage threshold of compressor diffraction gratings[1]
After reflection from the last diffraction grating of the compressor, the PEARL laser beam with a pulse energy of up to 18 J, a duration of 55–67 fs, and a diameter of 18 cm propagated 2.5 m in free space for self-filtering[18]
We used the reflection from the input uncoated surface to measure the spectrum and the autocorrelation function (ACF) of the input pulse
Summary
The power and, the focal intensity of petawatt and multipetawatt lasers are currently limited by the size and damage threshold of compressor diffraction gratings[1]. A multifold power enhancement can be achieved using mosaic gratings in the compressor or several parallel chirped pulse amplification (CPA) channels, each of which ends with a conventional compressor of its own In these cases, the power of the pulse increases as a result of increasing energy, while its duration remains unchanged. In the presented work we experimentally studied the compression of an output pulse of the laser PEARL (PEtawatt pARametric Laser[29]) by SMP in a KDP crystal in a wide range of B-integral values from 5 to 19 and compared the obtained results with those using silica[15,17,20]
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