High power laser developments with femtosecond to nanosecond pulse durations for laser shock science and engineering

Kiriyama, Hiromitsu; Mori, Michiaki; Suzuki, Masayuki*; Daito, Izuru*; Okada, Hajime; Ochi, Yoshihiro; Tanaka, Momoko; Sato, Masatoshi*; Tamaoki, Yoshinori*; Yoshii, Takehiro*; Maeda, Junya*; Matsuoka, Shinichi*; Kan, Hirofumi*; Kosuge, Atsushi  ; Kotaki, Hideyuki; Ogura, Koichi; Kando, Masaki; Kondo, Kiminori; Nagashima, Keisuke; Sugiyama, Akira; Bulanov, S. V.; Yokoyama, Atsushi; Bolton, P.

We describe three specific high power laser systems that are being developed in our laboratory for many applications in high field science, nonlinear optics and material processing. We report on a femtosecond petawatt-class Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification laser system that can produce a pulse energy of 20 J of 40 fs pulse duration, a picosecond high intensity Yb:YAG chirped-pulse amplification laser system that can generate a pulse energy of 100 mJ of 0.5 ps pulse duration, and a nanosecond high repetition rate Nd:YAG laser system that can provide an average power of 360 W with a pulse duration of 30 ns delivered at a 1 kHz repetition rate. We discuss the basic design aspects and present the results from our experimental investigations of these laser systems.