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; et al.

Applied Optics, 49(11), p.2105 - 2115, 2010/04

https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.49.002105

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.