High-repetition-rate chirped-pulse-amplification thin-disk laser system with joule-level pulse energy

Abstract

We are reporting on the development of a diode-pumped chirped-pulse-amplification (CPA) laser system based on Yb:YAG thin-disk technology with a repetition rate of 100 Hz and output pulse energy in the joule range. The focus lies with the first results of the preamplifier--a regenerative amplifier (RA) and a multipass amplifier (MP). The system consists of a front end including the CPA stretcher followed by an amplifier chain based on Yb:YAG thin-disk amplifiers and the CPA compressor. It is developed in the frame of our x-ray laser (XRL) program and fulfills all requirements for pumping a plasma-based XRL in grazing incidence pumping geometry. Of course it can also be used for other interesting applications. With the RA pulse energies of more than 165 mJ can be realized. At a repetition rate of 100 Hz a stability of 0.8% (1sigma) over a period of more than 45 min has been measured. The optical-to-optical efficiency is 14%. The following MP amplifier can increase the pulse energy to more than 300 mJ. A nearly bandwidth-limited recompression to less than 2 ps could be demonstrated.

Tunable All-Optical Quasimonochromatic Thomson X-Ray Source in the Nonlinear Regime

“…By combining this concept with future high-repetition rate laser systems based on OPCPA as the electron driver and using a part of their high-repetition rate picosecond pump lasers [45,46] as a colliding pulse, a resulting Thomson source could serve a variety of imaging applications in research, medicine, and industry due to its compactness, tunability, and unmatched short pulse duration. …”

Shielded radiography with a laser-driven MeV-energy X-ray source

“…Taking into account the narrow bandwidth, the LWFA-ICS should have comparable or even higher photon flux/ bandwidth in the MeV range compared with the bremsstrahlung source. By increasing the current inverse Compton source repetition rate, such as using a 50-Hz diode pumped laser system, and increasing electron beam charge to the nC level, the X-ray flux from LWFA-ICS sources can be further increased by more than one order of magnitude [23][24][25].…”

Ultra-Intense, High Spatio-Temporal Quality Petawatt-Class Laser System and Applications

“…However, one can overcome this limitation and also benefit from the improved stability and maintenance effort, which are required for many applications. Among several laser gain materials for short pulse amplification, the Yb:YAG is one of the most attractive materials for compact high intensity CPA lasers because of Yb 3+ ion's excellent spectroscopic and material properties for amplifying short pulses and for being pumped with commercially available near-infrared high power LD [110,111]. The LD pumped laser systems can be significantly more compact than similar lamp pumped laser systems.…”

“…Furthermore, it exhibits simple power scalability. Power can be increased by simply increasing the pump and seed diameters on the amplifier disk [110,111].…”