10 PW peak power femtosecond laser pulses at ELI-NP

Abstract

We report on the generation and delivery of 10.2 PW peak power laser pulses, using the High Power Laser System at the Extreme Laser Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics facility. In this work we demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the compression and propagation of full energy, full aperture, laser pulses that reach a power level of more than 10 PW.

Multilayer dielectric grating pillar-removal damage induced by a picosecond laser

“…The advancement in ultra-high-intensity petawatt laser systems [1][2][3][4] has promoted the development of extreme physics experiments, laser acceleration devices and biomedical engineering [5][6][7][8] . The chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technology proposed by Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland [9] in 1985 was a breakthrough in ultra-intense pulse laser laser-induced damage threshold (LIDT) because of the negligible intrinsic absorption of dielectric materials.…”

High-flux neutron generation by laser-accelerated ions from single- and double-layer targets

“…Both experiments were based on laser-acceleration of a deuteron beam from deuterated plastic targets via the target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) 19,20 or breakout afterburner (BOA) 21,22 mechanisms, and on subsequent 9 Be(d, n) nuclear reactions in a beryllium converter located a few mm behind the primary target. A variant of this method, whereby deuterons are driven by the laser radiation pressure in a near-critical-density plasma, has been recently investigated numerically under conditions relevant to the TRIDENT laser 23 .The aim of this paper is, rather, to examine the neutron beams that could be produced using (p, n) or (d, n) reactions triggered by 1-PW-class, few-femtosecond laser systems, such as Apollon 24 or the upcoming ELI facilities in the Czech Republic 25 and Romania 26,27 , and which are as well commercially available. These systems usually…”

“…The aim of this paper is, rather, to examine the neutron beams that could be produced using (p, n) or (d, n) reactions triggered by 1-PW-class, few-femtosecond laser systems, such as Apollon 24 or the upcoming ELI facilities in the Czech Republic 25 and Romania 26,27 , and which are as well commercially available. These systems usually…”

Probing strong-field QED in beam-plasma collisions

“…Advances in multi-petawatt laser systems [4][5][6] should soon allow strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) effects [7][8][9] to be induced and probed in extreme-intensity laser-matter interactions [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] . The main experimental challenge will be to access, in a controlled manner, a regime characterized by a quantum parameter χ = E * /E cr larger than unity, that is, where charged particles experience in their rest frame an electric field E * larger than the Schwinger critical field 20 E cr = m 2 e c 3 /e = 1.3 × 10 18 V m −1 (m e is the electron mass, e the elementary charge, c the speed of light and the reduced Planck constant).…”