OPCPA front end and contrast optimization for the OMEGA EP kilojoule, picosecond laser

Abstract

OMEGA EP is a large-scale laser system that combines optical parametric amplification and solid-state laser amplification on two beamlines to deliver high-intensity, high-energy optical pulses. The temporal contrast of the output pulse is limited by the front-end parametric fluorescence and other features that are specific to parametric amplification. The impact of the two-crystal parametric preamplifier, pump-intensity noise, and pump-signal timing is experimentally studied. The implementation of a parametric amplifier pumped by a short pump pulse before stretching, further amplification, and recompression to enhance the temporal contrast of the high-energy short pulse is described.

Characterizing extreme laser intensities by ponderomotive acceleration of protons from rarified gas

“…The formula (5) shows that energies of protons are proportional to the square of the peak intensity, if the other parameters introduced in the equation are fixed. Figure 4 illustrates the cutoff energies (dots in the form of circles, triangles and squares) obtained in numerical calculations as a functions of the peak intensity for different values of the focal spot size.…”

“…The formula (5) has been deduced under the assumption that the shift of protons during the interaction with the laser pulse is negligible as compared with the focal spot size, i.e. the intensity gradient retains its own value in the position of each particle.…”

“…Over the past two decades, significant progress in short-pulse high-power laser technology has resulted in the development of petawatt-class lasers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], ten petawatt-class lasers [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Even higher power laser systems have been proposed [19].…”

Non-Pulse-Leakage 100-kHz Level, High Beam Quality Industrial Grade Nd:YVO4 Picosecond Amplifier

“…However, the pulse energy of the directly generated mode-locked lasers is very low such that it restricts their applications. To solve this problem, different types of laser amplifiers are utilized, in which a regenerative amplifier is considered to be the most effective method for strong amplification of the mode-locked pulses [1,2,12,13]. In most cases, increasing the repetition rate and power can improve the efficiency of laser processing and laser ranging.…”

Generation of high-contrast, joule-level pulses based on Nd:glass chirped pulse amplification laser

“…To generate 1053 nm high-contrast seed pulses, many groups used optical parametric amplification (OPA) pumped by high-contrast psduration pulses which shared the same seed with the signal pulses [3][4][5][6][7] . With high-contrast seed injection, the contrast of the amplified pulse in the Nd:glass CPA systems had been improved, respectively [5][6][7][8] .…”