High-energy hybrid femtosecond laser system demonstrating 2 × 10 PW capability

Abstract

We report on a two-arm hybrid high-power laser system (HPLS) able to deliver 2 × 10 PW femtosecond pulses, developed at the Bucharest-Magurele Extreme Light Infrastructure Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) Facility. A hybrid front-end (FE) based on a Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplifier and a picosecond optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier based on beta barium borate (BBO) crystals, with a cross-polarized wave (XPW) filter in between, has been developed. It delivers 10 mJ laser pulses, at 10 Hz repetition rate, with more than 70 nm spectral bandwidth and high-intensity contrast, in the range of 1013:1. The high-energy Ti:sapphire amplifier stages of both arms were seeded from this common FE. The final high-energy amplifier, equipped with a 200 mm diameter Ti:sapphire crystal, has been pumped by six 100 J nanosecond frequency doubled Nd:glass lasers, at 1 pulse/min repetition rate. More than 300 J output pulse energy has been obtained by pumping with only 80% of the whole 600 J available pump energy. The compressor has a transmission efficiency of 74% and an output pulse duration of 22.7 fs was measured, thus demonstrating that the dual-arm HPLS has the capacity to generate 10 PW peak power femtosecond pulses. The reported results represent the cornerstone of the ELI-NP 2 × 10 PW femtosecond laser facility, devoted to fundamental and applied nuclear physics research.

Strong field physics pursued with petawatt lasers

“…Recently, multi-PW Ti:sapphire lasers have been or are being constructed at several institutes: 4.2 PW at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS) (Fig. 4) [31], 10 PW at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) [32], and 10 PW at Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) [33].…”

ReLaX: the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields high-intensity short-pulse laser driver for relativistic laser–matter interaction and strong-field science using the high energy density instrument at the European X-ray free electron laser facility

“…The ReLaX laser is based on a commercial 300 TW Titanium Sapphire system. A wide array of high-intensity laser facilities currently exist around the world, covering a range of power up to multi-PW level [6] , with a recent demonstration of the generation of pulses up to the 10 PW [7] and peak laser intensities [8] above 10 23 W /cm 2 . However, the number of Free Electron Lasers in the hard X-Ray regime is limited [9] , which makes the combination of highpower lasers and FELs a unique platform of research.…”

Direct Acceleration of an Annular Attosecond Electron Slice Driven by Near-Infrared Laguerre–Gaussian Laser

“…With the rapid development of ultra-short ultra-intense laser technology, the laser intensity can be increased up to 10 22 W/cm 2 in petawatt laser facilities [1][2][3][4] . Such laser pulses can be used to apply extremely high electromagnetic fields to accelerate electron beams to gigaelectronvolt levels [5,6] .…”