Speaker
Description
Next generation laser drivers for laser plasma acceleration and secondary radiation sources will require 3 to 4 orders of magnitude increase in pulse repetition rates, to produce TW-PW class peak power ultrashort pulses at multi-kilowatt average powers [1]. Coherently combined ultrashort pulse fiber laser systems are recognized as a pathway to such high power technology [1]. However, although the current state-of-the-art high-power coherently combined fiber laser systems have demonstrated a relatively large number of combined channels ranging from 16 and up to 61 so far, but they all achieved only moderate femtosecond pulse energies in the 10-30mJ range, far below what is needed for driving particle-acceleration experiments.
We had developed a novel time-domain coherent combining technique (coherent pulse stacking amplification - CPSA) that enables 100 times higher energies per channel than conventional fiber CPA, achieving record high femtosecond pulse energies of up to ~10mJ per channel, far exceeding any other fiber laser results. This opens an effective pathway to reaching higher pulse energies, which we recently validated in a 4-channel coherently-spatially combined array, producing ~27mJ per spatially and temporally combined beam [2]. We will report the development of a 12-channel table-top laboratory system upgrade to produce 100mJ/1kW spatially and temporally combined beams, which after compression are sufficient for acceleration and secondary-radiation experiments. This work includes development of a new energy-scalable pre-pulse cleaning technique necessary for driving majority of high-intensity laser plasma interactions. This development constitutes an important milestone towards future multi-kW average and TW-kW peak power laser drivers.
| Working group | WG1 : Laser-driven plasma wakefield acceleration |
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