1 petawatt OPCPA laser in Russia: Status and expectations

Abstract

In spite of the fact that the petawatt level has been attained quite a time ago [ 1 ], only a few petawatt facilities are available worldwide. One of them, a 056 PW OPCPA facility, was created at the Institute of Applied Physics in 2006 [2]. The main OPCPA merit is a possibility of power scaling . In the current work we report construction of still another Russian OPCPA-based laser complex.A 100 TW laser [ 3 ] was taken as a front-end system supplemented with one more cascade of parametric amplification -a KD*P crystal with clear aperture of 20xlO em. One channel of "Luch" facility (RFNC -VNIIEF, Sarov) [ 4] with 2 kJ output pulse energy at the wavelength of 1054 nm was used as a pump laser. A 1 kJ pulse having duration 2.3 ns at the second harmonic is used to pump the [mal stage of the parametric amplifier. Maximum energy obtained in a chirped pulse is more than 100 J ( fig. la). Autocorrelation function on compression is shown in fig. 1b. If the pulse shape is regarded to be Gaussian , then its duration is 70 fs, which corresponds to the power of 1 PW at compressor output. Beam divergence is close to diffraction limit ( fig. lc). (a) (b) (c) 120 100 0 ;;, 0 -80 s 0 1i 60 -= ore 0. '0 40 n~_~_ " e-I---20 o -rko0 _0 0 I o -----t-f 0 600 pump ene rgy , J 1200 1 Fig. 1 Dependence of chirped pulse energy on OPCPA pump energy (a), autocorrelation function (b), and far field distribution (c) oflPW beam.Perspectives of a further increase of laser power using OPCPA in a KD*P crystal are considered. There may be different ways of increasing power: i) pump power enhancement either using glass with high nonlinear refractive index or increasing amplifier aperture; ii) increase of the efficiency of parametric amplification, and iii) shortening of pulse duration as a result of which a KD*P crystal amplifies pulses with the spectrum corresponding to the duration of 10-15 fs.Other channels of"Luch" facility may also be employed as additional pump of parametric amplifier(s). References[II

Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide

“…The scheme was the same as PEARL but the final OPCPA amplifier was pumped by a 2 kJ Nd:glass slab laser LUCH [161] . The output power was 1 PW (70 J in 70 fs) [162] .…”

A Review of Optical Parametric Amplification at the Vulcan Laser Facility

“…This achievement was quickly spread amongst the high-power laser industry with proposed high-peak-power systems [2][3][4], and in the late 1990s initial experimentation began, with the demonstration of 1.3 TW at the Central Laser Facility (CLF) [5]. The highest achievable peak power then escalated: 3.67 TW in 2002 [6], 16.7 TW in 2003 [7], 100 TW in 2005 [8], 350 TW in 2006 [9], 560 TW in 2007 [10], and 1 PW in 2009 [11].…”

Acousto-optical adaptive correction of a chirped laser pulse spectral profile in a Nd-phosphate glass regenerative amplifier

“…Another trend is to use fundamentally different methods of broadband optical amplification, e.g. on the basis of parametric light amplifiers [12].…”