Ultrafast terawatt laser sources for high-field particle acceleration and short wavelength generation

The Laser Sources working group concerned itself with recent advances in and future requirements for the development of laser sources relevant to high-energy physics (HEP) colliders, small scale accelerators, and the generation of short wave-length radiation. We heavily emphasized pulsed terawatt peak power laser sources for several reasons. First, their development over the past five years has been rapid and multi-faceted, and has made relativistic light intensity available to the advanced accelerator community, as well as the wider physics community, for the first time. Secondly, they have strongly impacted plasma-based accelerator research over the past two years, producing the first experimental demonstrations of the laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) in both its resonantly-driven and self-modulated forms. Thirdly, their average power and wall-plug efficiency currently fall well short of projected requirements for future accelerators and other high average power applications, but show considerable promise for improving substantially over the next few years. A review of this rapidly emerging laser technology in the context of advanced accelerator research is therefore timely

Scaling to Ultra-High Intensities by High-Energy Petawatt Beam Combining

The output pulse energy from a single-aperture high-energy laser amplifier (e.g. fusion lasers such as NIF and LMJ) are critically limited by a number of factors including optical damage, which places an upper bound on the operating fluence; parasitic gain, which limits together with manufacturing costs the maximum aperture size to {approx} 40-cm; and non-linear phase effects which limits the peak intensity. For 20-ns narrow band pulses down to transform-limited sub-picosecond pulses, these limiters combine to yield 10-kJ to 1-kJ maximum pulse energies with up to petawatt peak power. For example, the Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) project at NIF is designed to provide kilo-Joule pulses from 0.75-ps to 50-ps, with peak focused intensity above 10{sup 19} W/cm{sup 2}. Using such a high-energy petawatt (HEPW) beamline as a modular unit, they discuss large-scale architectures for coherently combining multiple HEPW pulses from independent apertures, called CAPE (Coherent Addition of Pulses for Energy), to significantly increase the peak achievable focused intensity. Importantly, the maximum intensity achievable with CAPE increases non-linearly. Clearly, the total integrated energy grows linearly with the number of apertures N used. However, as CAPE combines beams in the focal plane by increasing the angular convergence to focus (i.e. the f-number decreases), the foal spot diameter scales inversely with N. Hence the peak intensity scales as N{sup 2}. Using design estimates for the focal spot size and output pulse energy (limited by damage fluence on the final compressor gratings) versus compressed pulse duration in the ARC system, Figure 2 shows the scaled focal spot intensity and total energy for various CAPE configurations from 1,2,4, ..., up to 192 total beams. They see from the fixture that the peak intensity for event modest 8 to 16 beam combinations reaches the 10{sup 21} to 10{sup 22} W/cm{sup 2} regime. With greater number of apertures, or with improvements to the focusability of the individual beams, the maximum peak intensity can be increased further to {approx} 10{sup 24} W/cm{sup 2}. Lastly, an important feature of the CAPE architecture is the ability to coherently combine beams to produce complex spatio-temporal intensity distributions for laser-based accelerators (e.g. all-optical electron injection and acceleration) and high energy density science applications such as fast ignition

Probing impulsive strain propagation with x-ray pulses

Pump-probe time-resolved x-ray diffraction of allowed and nearly forbidden reflections in InSb is used to follow the propagation of a coherent acoustic pulse generated by ultrafast laser-excitation. The surface and bulk components of the strain could be simultaneously measured due to the large x-ray penetration depth. Comparison of the experimental data with dynamical diffraction simulations suggests that the conventional model for impulsively generated strain underestimates the partitioning of energy into coherent modes.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX, eps. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. http://prl.aps.or

Ultra-fast Laser Synthesis of Nanopore Arrays in Silicon for Bio-molecule Separation and Detection

We demonstrate that interference of ultra-fast pulses of laser light can create regular patterns in thin silicon membranes that are compatible with the formation of a uniform array of nanopores. The spacing and size of these pores can be tuned by changing the laser energy, wavelength and number of ultra-short pulses. Short pulses and wavelengths ({approx}550 nm and smaller) are needed to define controllable nanoscale features in silicon. Energy must be localized in time and space to produce the etching, ablation or amorphization effects over the {approx}100 nm length scales appropriate for definition of single pores. Although in this brief study pattern uniformity was limited by laser beam quality, a complementary demonstration reported here used continuous-wave interferometric laser exposure of photoresist to show the promise of the ultra-fast approach for producing uniform pore arrays. The diameters of these interferometrically-defined features are significantly more uniform than the diameters of pores in state-of-the-art polycarbonate track etch membranes widely used for molecular separations

10-kJ Status and 100-kJ Future for NIF PetaWatt Technology

We discuss the status of the NIF ARC, an 8-beam 10-kJ class high-energy petawatt laser, and the future upgrade path of this and similar systems to 100-kJ-class with coherent phasing of multiple apertures

Laser wakefield excitation and measurement by femtosecond longitudinal interferometry

Plasma density oscillations (Langmuir waves) in the wake of an intense (I{sub peak} {approximately} 3 {times} 10{sup 17}W/cm{sup 2}) laser pulse (100 fs) are measured with ultrafast time resolution using a longitudinal interferometric technique. Phase shifts consistent with large amplitude ({delta}n{sub e}/n{sub e} {approximately} 1) density waves at the electron plasma frequency were observed in a fully tunnel-ionized He plasma, corresponding to longitudinal electric fields of {approximately} 10 GV/m. Strong radial ponderomotive forces enhance the density oscillations. As this technique utilizes a necessary component of any laser-based plasma accelerator, it promises to be a powerful tool for on-line monitoring and control of future plasma-based particle accelerators

Power scaling analysis of fiber lasers and amplifiers based on non-silica materials

A developed formalism for analyzing the power scaling of diffraction limited fiber lasers and amplifiers is applied to a wider range of materials. Limits considered include thermal rupture, thermal lensing, melting of the core, stimulated Raman scattering, stimulated Brillouin scattering, optical damage, bend induced limits on core diameter and limits to coupling of pump diode light into the fiber. For conventional fiber lasers based upon silica, the single aperture, diffraction limited power limit was found to be 36.6kW. This is a hard upper limit that results from an interaction of the stimulated Raman scattering with thermal lensing. This result is dependent only upon physical constants of the material and is independent of the core diameter or fiber length. Other materials will have different results both in terms of ultimate power out and which of the many limits is the determining factor in the results. Materials considered include silica doped with Tm and Er, YAG and YAG based ceramics and Yb doped phosphate glass. Pros and cons of the various materials and their current state of development will be assessed. In particular the impact of excess background loss on laser efficiency is discussed

Fiber laser front end for high energy petawatt laser systems

We are developing a fiber laser front end suitable for high energy petawatt laser systems on large glass lasers such as NIF. The front end includes generation of the pulses in a fiber mode-locked oscillator, amplification and pulse cleaning, stretching of the pulses to >3ns, dispersion trimming, timing, fiber transport of the pulses to the main laser bay and amplification of the pulses to an injection energy of 150 {micro}J. We will discuss current status of our work including data from packaged components. Design detail such as how the system addresses pulse contrast, dispersion trimming and pulse width adjustment and impact of B-integral on the pulse amplification will be discussed. A schematic of the fiber laser system we are constructing is shown in figure 1 below. A 40MHz packaged mode-locked fiber oscillator produces {approx}1nJ pulses which are phase locked to a 10MHz reference clock. These pulses are down selected to 100kHz and then amplified while still compressed. The amplified compressed pulses are sent through a non-linear polarization rotation based pulse cleaner to remove background amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). The pulses are then stretched by a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) and then sent through a splitter. The splitter splits the signal into two beams. (From this point we follow only one beam as the other follows an identical path.) The pulses are sent through a pulse tweaker that trims dispersion imbalances between the final large optics compressor and the CFBG. The pulse tweaker also permits the dispersion of the system to be adjusted for the purpose of controlling the final pulse width. Fine scale timing between the two beam lines can also be adjusted in the tweaker. A large mode area photonic crystal single polarization fiber is used to transport the pulses from the master oscillator room to the main laser bay. The pulses are then amplified a two stage fiber amplifier to 150mJ. These pulses are then launched into the main amplifier chain. We are currently constructing a packaged prototype of this system, which will ultimately be deployed on the National Ignition Facility (NIF). In our talk we will discuss the packaged components as well as the numerous technical challenges that needed to be overcome in order to make this system possible. Of particular interest was the quality of recompressed pulses that could be achieved with a CFBG. We will show background free auto-correlation data from pulses with a dynamic range noise limited to six orders of magnitude that were stretched with a CFBG and then recompressed in a standard compressor (figure 2). We will also discuss in detail the impact of B-integral accumulation on the recompressed pulses. Our current system is projected to run at an accumulated B-integral of 7. However, because our injected system bandwidth is much wider than the NIF system bandwidth our system can tolerate this high B-integral

High Brightness, Laser-Driven X-ray Source for Nanoscale Metrology and Femtosecond Dynamics

This project developed and demonstrated a new, bright, ultrafast x-ray source based upon laser-driven K-alpha generation, which can produce an x-ray flux 10 to 100 times greater than current microfocus x-ray tubes. The short-pulse (sub-picosecond) duration of this x-ray source also makes it ideal for observing time-resolved dynamics of atomic motion in solids and thin films