High Energy and Short Pulse Lasers

Abstract

The progress in the laser technology makes it possible to produce a laser pulse having a peak power of over PW. Focusing such high-power laser pulses enables ones to have unprecedentedly strong laser intensity. The laser intensity over 10 19 W/cm 2 , which is called the relativistic laser intensity, can accelerate electrons almost to the speed of light. The acceleration of charged particles using such a high-power laser pulse has been successfully demonstrated in many experiments. According to the recent calculation using the vector diffraction theory, it is possible, by employing a tight focusing geometry, to produce a femtosecond (fs) laser focal spot to have an intensity of over 10 24 W/cm 2 in the focal plane. Over this laser intensity, protons can be directly accelerated almost to the speed of light. Such ultrashort and ultrastrong laser intensities will bring ones many opportunities to experimentally study ultrafast physical phenomena we have never met before. This chapter describes how to generate a high-power laser pulse. And, then the focusing characteristics of a femtosecond high-power laser pulse are discussed in the scalar and the vector diffraction limits. Finally, the applications of ultrashort high-power laser are briefly introduced.

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

“…In particular OPA with its ability to generate ultra-broadband pulses with high energy has raised a great interest [42,48,51,60,61,104,105]. While analytical considerations such as presented in Section 2.2.1 help to identify the important quantities and constraints, they generally have to make certain assumptions to be analytically solvable.…”

“…The SISYFOS package by Gunnar Arisholm [104] on the other hand is able to integrate experimental data or arbitrary pulse parameters and has been extensively used to simulate OPCPA systems such as PFS [49,105,107]. It constitutes a very powerful tool that contains most linear and nonlinear effects (except for XPM, XPW) and even allows the simulation of entire optical systems consisting of multiple components.…”

The LaserFIB: new application opportunities combining a high-performance FIB-SEM with femtosecond laser processing in an integrated second chamber

“…This creates an unwanted temperature rise at the surface leading to thermal vaporisation, evaporation and plasma formation. This leads to local heating (Hamad 2016) (LaHaye et al 2013) and subsequent melting of the native microstructure.…”