High spatiotemporal-quality petawatt-class laser system

Kiriyama, Hiromitsu; Mori, Michiaki; Nakai, Yoshiki; Shimomura, Takuya; Sasao, Hajime; Tanaka, Momoko; Ochi, Yoshihiro; Tanoue, Manabu*; Okada, Hajime; Kondo, Shuji; Kanazawa, Shuhei; Sagisaka, Akito; Daito, Izuru; Wakai, Daisuke*; Sasao, Fumitaka*; Suzuki, Masayuki; Kotaki, Hideyuki; Kondo, Kiminori; Sugiyama, Akira; Bulanov, S. V.; Bolton, P.; Daido, Hiroyuki; Kawanishi, Shunichi; Collier, J. L.*; Hernandez-Gomez, C.*; Hooker, C. J.*; Ertel, K.*; Kimura, Toyoaki*; Tajima, Toshiki

We have developed a femtosecond high intensity laser system, which combines both Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) and optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) techniques, that produces more than 30-J broadband output energy, indicating the potential for achieving peak powers in excess of 500-TW. With a cleaned high-energy seeded OPCPA preamplifier as a front-end in the system, for the compressed pulse without pumping the final amplifier we found that the temporal contrast in this system exceeds 10 on the sub-nanosecond timescales, and is near 10 on the nanosecond timescale prior to the peak of the main femtosecond pulse. Using diffractive optical elements for beam homogenization of 100-J level high-energy Nd:glass green pump laser in a Ti:sapphire final amplifier, we have successfully generated broadband high-energy output with a near-perfect top-hat-like intensity distribution.