In a recent study, scientists at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, designed a new in-house beam-splitting pulse compressor for high-energy petawatt lasers. This work had been published in Optics Express.

Kilojoule-level petawatt (PW) to hundreds-PW laser pulses have opened up many important research fields in ultrahigh intensity physics, such as laboratory astrophysics, particle acceleration, nuclear physics, and nonlinear QED. One of the most significant bottlenecks in achieving kilojoule-level PW-100PW lasers is the requirement of as large as meter-sized gratings, which have so far been difficult to manufacture. To achieve kilojoule-level PW output, the 200-PW lasers proposed by ELI and XCELS, tens of pulse compressors together with tiled-aperture beam-combining are used, which make the system complex, the cost very high, and difficult to accomplish tiled-aperture beam-combining.

Here, Prof. Liu Jun and his cooperators proposed a new in-house (intra-) beam-splitting compressor based on the property that the damage threshold of gratings depends on the pulse duration. The proposed scheme will simultaneously improve the stability, save on expensive gratings, and simplify compressor size because the split beams share the first two parallel gratings.

Furthermore, simple and economical glass plates with designed transmitted wavefront were used to compensate for the space-time distortion in the compressor, and thus improve focal intensity. Together with a tiled-aperture combining scheme, the proposed novel compressor provides a new scheme for achieving kilojoule-level PW-100PW lasers or even exawatt lasers with relatively small gratings in the future.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Instrument Developing Project and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project.

(Image by SIOM)

Article website:
https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-28-15-22978

Contact:
Mr. Wu Xiufeng
General Administrative Office
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, CAS
Email: xfwu@siom.ac.cn