Large-aperture deformable mirror correction of tiled-grating wavefront error

When tiling three gratings, with each individually exhibiting astigmatism and power due to holographic errors and coating stress, the resulting wavefront aberrations contain high-frequency components as well as the fundamental frequency, which is nearly three cycles across the aperture in the tiling direction. A deformable mirror (DM) that was designed to compensate for much slower errors (e.g., those arising from distortion in amplifier disks) is being used to compensate for this tiling-induced error. This investigation studies the effectiveness of compensating only the fundamental frequency of the tiled aberration, and shows that this provides a significant improvement that is adequate for a range of expected aberrations. Limitations of the DM correction technique are also studied

OMEGA EP: High-energy petawatt capability for the OMEGA laser facility

OMEGA EP (Extended Performance) is a petawatt-class addition to the existing 30-kJ, 60-beam OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester. When completed, it will consist of four beamlines, each capable of producing up to 6.5 kJ at 351 nm in a 1 to 10 ns pulse. Two of the beamlines will produce up to 2.6 kJ in a pulse-width range of 1 to 100 ps at 1053 nm using chirped-pulse amplification (CPA). This paper reviews both the OMEGA EP performance objectives and the enabling technologies required to meet these goals