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We present the setup of a compact, q-switched, cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG laser, which is capable of producing over 1 J output energy in a 10 ns pulse at 10 Hz. The system's design is based on the recently published unstable cavity layout with gain shaping of the spatial intra-cavity intensity distribution. Using a hexagonal homogenized pump beam, the laser generated an according hexagonal output beam profile. The suitability of such laser properties for the intended use in a laser shock peening process is demonstrated. In the experiment an aluminum plate was treated and the generated residual stresses in the sample subsequently measured. Other applications of this laser system like laser pumping or surface cleaning are conceivable.
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A compact, femtosecond-pumped noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA) is presented with a passive spectral shaping technique, employed to produce a flat-top-like ultrabroadband output spectrum. The NOPA is pumped by a dedicated 2 mJ, 120 fs Yb3+-based CPA system, which generates both the second harmonic pump pulse and white light supercontinuum as the signal pulse. A chirped mirror pair pre-compensates the material GVD within the optical path of the signal pulse to produce a near-FTL pulse duration at the OPA crystal output. By optimizing both the pump/signal cross angle and the pump/signal delay, the 40 cm × 40 cm footprint, single-pass, fs-pumped, direct NOPA (non-NOPCPA) system generates a record 20 µJ, 11 fs pulses at 820 nm central wavelength with a bandwidth of 230 nm FWHM, to be used as an ultrashort optical probe pulse for relativistic laser-plasma interactions at the petawatt-class POLARIS laser system.
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We present pulse stretching with an intracavity Offner-type pulse stretcher applied to a high-energy, short-pulse laser system. The compact intracavity design, offering a tunable stretching factor, allows the pulses to be stretched to several nanoseconds and, at the same time, to be amplified to 100 µJ. The stretched pulses have been further amplified with the high-power laser system Polaris and have been recompressed to durations as short as 102 fs, reaching peak powers of 100 TW. Furthermore, the temporal intensity contrast is investigated and compared to the formerly used stretcher setup.
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A technique to measure the spatially resolved temperature distribution in a laser medium is presented. It is based on the temperature dependence of the absorption cross section close to the zero-phonon line of the active medium. Since other materials in the beam path exhibit a high (and constant) transmission at this wavelength, the method can easily be applied in realistic amplifier setups. The method was successfully tested on three different samples, which were pumped by a pulsed laser diode with up to 150 W average power: side-cooled Yb:YAG and Yb:fluoride-phosphate glass at room temperature and face-cooled Yb:CaF2 at 120 K.
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We demonstrate the generation of 86 fs, 35 mJ, high-contrast laser pulses at 1030 nm with a repetition rate of 1 Hz from a diode-pumped double chirped-pulse amplification setup. The pulses exhibit a spectral bandwidth exceeding 27 nm full width at half-maximum. This could be achieved by using a laser architecture comprising two stages of chirped pulse amplification with a cross-polarized wave generation filter in between, by applying spectral shaping and by increasing the spectral hard-clip of the second stretcher. These are, to the best of our knowledge, the shortest pulses at the mJ level with ultra-high contrast generated with a diode-pumped front end at 1030 nm.
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We present tunable spectral filters (TSFs) as a variable and precisely adjustable method to control the spectral gain of short-pulse laser systems. The TSFs provide a small residual spectral phase and a high damage threshold, and generate no pre- or post-pulses. The method is demonstrated for two different laser materials and can be applied as an intracavity compensation in regenerative amplifiers as well as a method for pre-compensation in high-energy multipass amplifiers. With this method, a full width at half-maximum bandwidth of 23.9 nm could be demonstrated in a diode-pumped, 50 J Yb:CaF2 amplifier.
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We report on results from the fully diode-pumped chirped-pulse amplification laser system Polaris. Pulses were amplified to a maximum energy of 54.2 J before compression. These pulses have a full width at half-maximum spectral bandwidth of 18 nm centered at 1033 nm and are generated at a repetition rate of 0.02 Hz. To the best of our knowledge, these are the most energetic broadband laser pulses generated by a diode-pumped laser system so far. Due to the limited size of our vacuum compressor, only attenuated pulses could be compressed to a duration of 98 fs containing an energy of 16.7 J, which leads to a peak power of 170 TW. These pulses could be focused to a peak intensity of 1.3×1021 W/cm2. Having an ultra-high temporal contrast of 1012 with respect to amplified spontaneous emission these laser pulses are well suited for high-intensity laser-matter experiments.
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We present the results from a new frontend within a double-chirped pulse amplification architecture (DCPA) utilizing crossed-polarized wave generation (XPW) for generating ultra-high contrast, 150 µJ-level, femtosecond seed pulses at 1030 nm. These pulses are used in the high energy class diode-pumped laser system Polaris at the Helmholtz Institute in Jena. Within this frontend, laser pulses from a 75 MHz oscillator-pulse train are extracted at a repetition rate of 1 Hz, temporally stretched, amplified and then recompressed reaching a pulse energy of 2 mJ, a bandwidth of 12 nm and 112 fs pulse duration at a center wavelength of 1030 nm. These pulses are temporally filtered via XPW in a holographic-cut BaF2 crystal, resulting in 150 µJ pulse energy with an efficiency of 13 %. Due to this non-linear filtering, the relative intensity of the amplified spontaneous emission preceding the main pulse is suppressed to 2×10⻹³. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the lowest value achieved in a high peak power laser system operating at 1030 nm center wavelength.
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We report the amplification of laser pulses at a center wavelength of 1034 nm to an energy of 16.6 J from a fully diode-pumped amplifier using Yb:CaF2 as the active medium. Pumped by a total optical power of 300 kW from high-power laser diodes, a gain factor of g=6.1 was achieved in a nine-pass amplifier configuration agreeing with numerical simulations. A measured spectral bandwidth of 10 nm full width at half-maximum promises a bandwidth-limited compression of the pulses down to a duration of 150 fs. These are, to our knowledge, the most energetic laser pulses achieved from a diode-pumped chirped-pulse amplifier so far.
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We present a novel approach for the amplification of high peak power femtosecond laser pulses at a high repetition rate. This approach is based on an all-diode pumped burst mode laser scheme. In this scheme, pulse bursts with a total duration between 1 and 2 ms are be generated and amplified. They contain 50 to 2000 individual pulses equally spaced in time. The individual pulses have an initial duration of 350 fs and are stretched to 50 ps prior to amplification. The amplifier stage is based on Yb3+:CaF2 cooled to 100 K. In this amplifier, a total output energy in excess of 600 mJ per burst at a repetition rate of 10 Hz is demonstrated. For lower repetition rates the total output energy per burst can be scaled up to 915 mJ using a longer pump duration. This corresponds to an efficiency as high as 25% of extracted energy from absorbed pump energy. This is the highest efficiency, which has so far been demonstrated for a pulsed Yb3+:CaF2 amplifier.
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Temperature dependent absorption and emission cross-sections of 5 at% Yb(3+) doped yttrium lanthanum oxide (Yb:YLO) ceramic between 80K and 300 K are presented. In addition, we report on the first demonstration of ns pulse amplification in Yb:YLO ceramic. A pulse energy of 102 mJ was extracted from a multi-pass amplifier setup. The amplification bandwidth at room temperature confirms the potential of Yb:YLO ceramic for broad bandwidth amplification at cryogenic temperatures.
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We report on the first generation of high-contrast, 164 fs duration pulses from the laser system POLARIS reaching focused peak intensities in excess of 2×10(20) W/cm2. To our knowledge, this is the highest peak intensity reported so far that has been achieved with a diode-pumped, solid-state laser. Several passive contrast enhancement techniques have been specially developed and implemented, achieving a relative prepulse intensity smaller than 10(-8) at t=-30 ps before the main pulse. Furthermore a closed-loop adaptive-optics system has been installed. Together with angular chirp compensation, this method has led to a significant reduction of the focal spot size and an increase of the peak intensity.
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A novel diagnostic method has been used to gain deeper insight into the transverse structure and its evolution of electron pulses generated from a laser-wakefield accelerator.
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We investigate the properties of a laser-plasma electron accelerator as a bright source of keV x-ray radiation. During the interaction, the electrons undergo betatron oscillations and from the carefully measured x-ray spectrum the oscillation amplitude of the electrons can be deduced which decreases with increasing electron energies. From the oscillation amplitude and the independently measured x-ray source size of (1.8±0.3) µm we are able to estimate the electron bunch diameter to be (1.6±0.3) µm.
Asunto(s)
Electrones , Rayos Láser , Aceleradores de Partículas , Dispersión de Radiación , Rayos XRESUMEN
We report on the performance of a system employing a multi-layer coated mirror creating circularly polarized light in a fully reflective setup. With one specially designed mirror we are able to create laser pulses with an ellipticity of more than ε = 98% over the entire spectral bandwidth from initially linearly polarized Titanium:Sapphire femtosecond laser pulses. We tested the homogeneity of the polarization with beam sizes of the order of approximately 10 cm. The damage threshold was determined to be nearly 400 times higher than for a transmissive quartz-wave plate which suggests applications in high intensity laser experiments. Another advantage of the reflective scheme is the absence of nonlinear effects changing the spectrum or the pulse-form and the scalability of coating fabrication to large aperture mirrors.
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We describe a method that can be used for the coherent addition of laser pulses. As different laser pulses are initially generated in a laser-pulse compressor equipped with a tiled grating, such a coherent addition is indispensable in order to maximize the intensity in the laser far field. We present measurements in this context where, up to now, an unavoidable difference in the grating constants between the phased gratings reduced the maximum achievable intensity. The method significantly facilitates the high-precision alignment of a tiled grating compressor and could also be used for a coherent addition of laser pulses.
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We report on a proton acceleration experiment in which high-intensity laser pulses with a wavelength of 0.4 µm and with varying temporal intensity contrast have been used to irradiate water droplets of 20 µm diameter. Such droplets are a reliable and easy-to-implement type of target for proton acceleration experiments with the potential to be used at very high repetition rates. We have investigated the influence of the laser's angle of incidence by moving the droplet along the laser polarization axis. This position, which is coupled with the angle of incidence, has a crucial impact on the maximum proton energy. Central irradiation leads to an inefficient coupling of the laser energy into hot electrons, resulting in a low maximum proton energy. The introduction of a controlled pre-pulse produces an enhancement of hot electron generation in this geometry and therefore higher proton energies. However, two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations support our experimental results confirming, that even slightly higher proton energies are achieved under grazing laser incidence when no additional pre-plasma is present. Illuminating a droplet under grazing incidence generates a stream of hot electrons that flows along the droplet's surface due to self-generated electric and magnetic fields and ultimately generates a strong electric field responsible for proton acceleration. The interaction conditions were monitored with the help of an ultra-short optical probe laser, with which the plasma expansion could be observed.
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Shadowgraphy is a technique widely used to diagnose objects or systems in various fields in physics and engineering. In shadowgraphy, an optical beam is deflected by the object and then the intensity modulation is captured on a screen placed some distance away. However, retrieving quantitative information from the shadowgrams themselves is a challenging task because of the nonlinear nature of the process. Here, we present a method to retrieve quantitative information from shadowgrams, based on computational geometry. This process can also be applied to proton radiography for electric and magnetic field diagnosis in high-energy-density plasmas and has been benchmarked using a toroidal magnetic field as the object, among others. It is shown that the method can accurately retrieve quantitative parameters with error bars less than 10%, even when caustics are present. The method is also shown to be robust enough to process real experimental results with simple pre- and postprocessing techniques. This adds a powerful tool for research in various fields in engineering and physics for both techniques.
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The expansion of a semi-infinite plasma slab into vacuum is analyzed with a hydrodynamic model implying a steplike electron energy distribution function. Analytic expressions for the maximum ion energy and the related ion distribution function are derived and compared with one-dimensional numerical simulations. The choice of the specific non-Maxwellian initial electron energy distribution automatically ensures the conservation of the total energy of the system. The estimated ion energies may differ by an order of magnitude from the values obtained with an adiabatic expansion model supposing a Maxwellian electron distribution. Furthermore, good agreement with data from experiments using laser pulses of ultrashort durations τ(L)
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We present a tomographic characterization of gas jets employed for high-intensity laser-plasma interaction experiments where the shape can be non-symmetrically. With a Mach-Zehnder interferometer we measured the phase shift for different directions through the neutral density distribution of the gas jet. From the recorded interferograms it is possible to retrieve 3-dimensional neutral density distributions by tomographic reconstruction based on the filtered back projections. We report on criteria for the smallest number of recorded interferograms as well as a comparison with the widely used phase retrieval based on an Abel inversion. As an example for the performance of our approach, we present the characterization of nozzles with rectangular openings or gas jets with shock waves. With our setup we obtained a spatial resolution of less than 60 µm for an Argon density as low as 2 × 10(17) cm(-3).