ABSTRACT
We report on the successful demonstration of a 100 J-level, diode pumped solid state laser based on cryogenic gas cooled, multi-slab ceramic Yb:YAG amplifier technology. When operated at 175 K, the system delivered a pulse energy of 107 J at a 1 Hz repetition rate and 10 ns pulse duration, pumped by 506 J of diode energy at 940 nm, corresponding to an optical-to-optical efficiency of 21%. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the highest energy obtained from a nanosecond pulsed diode pumped solid state laser. This demonstration confirms the energy scalability of the diode pumped optical laser for experiments laser architecture.
ABSTRACT
We propose, for the first time, a transmission grating stretcher for high power lasers and demonstrate its superiority over conventional, reflective gold grating stretchers in terms of pulse temporal quality. We show that, compared to a conventional stretcher with the same stretching factor, the transmission-grating based stretcher yields more than an order of magnitude improvement in the contrast pedestal. We have also quantitatively characterized the roughness of the grating surfaces and estimated its impact on the contrast pedestal.
Subject(s)
Lasers , Optics and Photonics/instrumentation , Gold , Spectrum Analysis , Surface Properties , Time FactorsABSTRACT
We report on an experimental study of the "coherent" contrast feature that frequently appears in petawatt(PW)-class laser pulses as an exponentially-rising pedestal within a few tens of picoseconds of the compressed pulse. We show that scattering from the diffraction gratings in the stretcher is the principal source of this feature. Replacing the gratings by new, higher-quality components resulted in an order-of-magnitude reduction in the intensity of the pedestal.
