Development of a Joule‐class Yb:YAG amplifier and its implementation in a CPA system generating 1 TW pulses

Abstract

In this paper the development and implementation of a novel amplifier setup as an additional stage for the CPA pump laser of the Petawatt Field Synthesizer, currently developed at the Max‐Planck‐Institute of Quantum Optics, is presented. This amplifier design comprises 20 relay‐imaged passes through the active medium which are arranged in rotational symmetry. As the gain material, an in‐house‐developed Yb:YAG active‐mirror is used. With this setup, stretched 4 ns seed pulses are amplified to output energies exceeding 1 J with repetition rates of up to 2 Hz. Furthermore, a spectral bandwidth of 3.5 nm (FWHM) is maintained during amplification and the compression of the pulses down to their Fourier‐limit of 740 fs is achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of 1 TW pulses generated via CPA in diode‐pumped Yb:YAG.

Generation and Parametric Amplification of Few‐Cycle Light Pulses at Relativistic Intensities

“…Framed boxes in the overview indicate elements that -compared to the system status reported in previous works [49,54,57,59] -are new in the sense that these elements were greatly modified, have been installed and used for the first time or constitute entirely new developments. In the present chapter, some of these new elements will be described and a summary of the already established components will be given to provide a general understanding of the PFS system.…”

Compact Aberration-Free Relay-Imaging Multi-Pass Layouts for High-Energy Laser Amplifiers

“…This corresponds to the widely-used version of a double-passed 4f-telescope for a multiple imaging layout as, e.g., in [4,6,7]. We will refer to such a kind of system in the following as a Type I system.…”

“…It should be mentioned that Type I systems are identical to Type II systems for d 3 = 0 and half the focal length of the second element, to consider the double pass on this element. Under these conditions, Equations (3), (4) and (6), (7) are equivalent.…”

“…With these setups, a high beam quality and a high number of round-trips have been achieved [4][5][6][7]. Furthermore, due to the repeated use of the imaging optics, the setups described in [5][6][7] allowed one to achieve a high number of material passes with a low number of optics.…”

Status of the High Average Power Diode-Pumped Solid State Laser Development at HiLASE

“…A folded beam path is used, and the beam size is increased at each pass. Higher pulse energies (>1 J) at lower repetition rates (10 Hz, 100 Hz) have been achieved by using conventional designs [12], thick disks [13][14][15][16], total reflection active mirrors (TRAM) [17] or multi-slabs [18,19]. Some of them employ operation at cryogenic temperatures using the advantages of higher thermal conductivity and higher gain at low temperatures [20,21].…”