High intensity, high temporal contrast, high repetition-rate laser for laser driven particle acceleration

Suzuki, Masayuki; Kiriyama, Hiromitsu; Daito, Izuru; Okada, Hajime; Ochi, Yoshihiro; Sato, Masatoshi*; Yoshii, Takehiro*; Tamaoki, Yoshinori*; Maeda, Junya*; Matsuoka, Shinichi*; Kan, Hirofumi*; Bolton, P.; Sugiyama, Akira; Kondo, Kiminori; Kawanishi, Shunichi*

We have reported hundred mJ level, femtosecond pulse duration with the high temporal contrast in an OPCPA/Yb:YAG ceramic thin disk laser system at 10 Hz repetition rate. At an input laser pulse energy of 3.8 mJ from the OPCPA preamplifer the output energy of 130 mJ with spectral bandwidth of 2.5 nm has been obtained from multipass Yb:YAG ceramic thin disk amplifier, and the optical efficiency from LD energy to amplified laser pulse is 9.6%. The recompressed laser pulse duration was measured to be 450 fs. Because the compressor efficiency exceeds 73% the compressed pulse energy can potentially be as high as 95 mJ. The contrast level of this laser pulse was measured to be less than 7.210 at -150 ps. This novel laser system after further amplification using additional amplifiers can be useful for the laser-driven proton acceleration in future.