Results for “Solid-State Power Amplifiers” — Page 2

DOE OSTI2020

Demonstration of a 2 ps, 5 TW peak power, long-wave infrared laser based on chirped-pulse amplification with mixed-isotope CO 2 amplifiers 2 amplifiers

We report generation of 5 TW peak power in a 2 ps pulse at 9.2 µm via chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) in mixed-isotope high-pressure CO 2 laser amplifiers. This represents the highest peak power in a single picosecond pulse format and the shortest pulse at terawatt peak power ever achieved in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) spectral range. Maximum demonstrated energy of the compressed pulse is 14 J and minimum period between shots is 20 s. The successful implementation of the chirped pulse amplification technique in a short-pulse gas laser opens a route to development of LWIR laser facilities with tens of terawatts of peak power, thus approaching the number of photons per optical cycle of current near-infrared laser systems based on solid-state active media.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

DOE OSTI2022

Ionization-Based Optical Structures for the Control of Short-Pulse Lasers (Abbreviated LDRD Report)

The intensity of light from the highest-power lasers is limited by the size of the optics required to amplify, compress, transport, and focus a laser beam. Indeed, optics damage puts strict constraints on the laser energy density that solid optics can sustain; this leads to enormous optics sizes and limits the maximum intensity that these lasers can achieve. In this project we investigated new types of diffractive optics based on mixtures of neutral gas and plasmas. The basic idea is to interfere laser beams in a gas near the ionization threshold, so that plasma is created in the constructive interference regions (i.e., the “bright” fringes of the interference pattern) while the destructive interference regions remain a neutral gas. The resulting refractive index modulation, due to the different indices in gas vs. plasma, effectively turns such structures into diffractive optics elements. We proposed several new types of optics based on this general concept: i) reflection gratings, which can act as mirrors of “pulse cleaners” to eliminate laser pre-pulse; ii) transmission gratings, as part of a new type of pulse compression scheme with the potential to achieve laser intensities orders of magnitude above what is currently feasible using solid-state optics; and iii) holographic lenses, to focus high-power lasers. We conducted laboratory experiments which demonstrated high efficiency reflection gratings, paving the way for practical applications of our new concepts.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗