Optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) [Dubietis et al., Opt. Commun. 88, 437 (1992)] implemented by multikilojoule Nd:glass pump lasers is a promising approach to produce ultraintense pulses (>10 23 W/cm 2 ). Technologies are being developed to upgrade the OMEGA EP Laser System with the goal to pump an optical parametric amplifier line (EP OPAL) with two of the OMEGA EP beamlines. The resulting ultraintense pulses (1.5 kJ, 20 fs, 10 24 W/cm 2 ) would be used jointly with picosecond and nanosecond pulses produced by the other two beamlines. A midscale OPAL pumped by the Multi-Terawatt (MTW) laser is being constructed to produce 7.5-J, 15-fs pulses and demonstrate scalable technologies suitable for the upgrade. MTW OPAL will share a target area with the MTW laser (50 J, 1 to 100 ps), enabling several joint-shot configurations. We report on the status of the MTW OPAL system, and the technology development required for this class of all-OPCPA laser system for ultraintense pulses.
We present, for the first time to our knowledge, an explicit experimental comparison of beam quality in conventional and confined-gain multimode fiber lasers. In the conventional fiber laser, beam quality degrades with increasing output power. In the confined-gain fiber laser, the beam quality is good and does not degrade with output power. Gain filtering of higher-order modes in 28 μm diameter core fiber lasers is demonstrated with a beam quality of M 2 ¼ 1:3 at all pumping levels. Theoretical modeling is shown to agree well with experimentally observed trends.
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