In spite of the fact that the petawatt level has been attained quite a time ago [ 1 ], only a few petawatt facilities are available worldwide. One of them, a 056 PW OPCPA facility, was created at the Institute of Applied Physics in 2006 [2]. The main OPCPA merit is a possibility of power scaling . In the current work we report construction of still another Russian OPCPA-based laser complex.A 100 TW laser [ 3 ] was taken as a front-end system supplemented with one more cascade of parametric amplification -a KD*P crystal with clear aperture of 20xlO em. One channel of "Luch" facility (RFNC -VNIIEF, Sarov) [ 4] with 2 kJ output pulse energy at the wavelength of 1054 nm was used as a pump laser. A 1 kJ pulse having duration 2.3 ns at the second harmonic is used to pump the [mal stage of the parametric amplifier. Maximum energy obtained in a chirped pulse is more than 100 J ( fig. la). Autocorrelation function on compression is shown in fig. 1b. If the pulse shape is regarded to be Gaussian , then its duration is 70 fs, which corresponds to the power of 1 PW at compressor output. Beam divergence is close to diffraction limit ( fig. lc). (a) (b) (c) 120 100 0 ;;, 0 -80 s 0 1i 60 -= ore 0. '0 40 n~_~_ " e-I---20 o -rko0 _0 0 I o -----t-f 0 600 pump ene rgy , J 1200 1 Fig. 1 Dependence of chirped pulse energy on OPCPA pump energy (a), autocorrelation function (b), and far field distribution (c) oflPW beam.Perspectives of a further increase of laser power using OPCPA in a KD*P crystal are considered. There may be different ways of increasing power: i) pump power enhancement either using glass with high nonlinear refractive index or increasing amplifier aperture; ii) increase of the efficiency of parametric amplification, and iii) shortening of pulse duration as a result of which a KD*P crystal amplifies pulses with the spectrum corresponding to the duration of 10-15 fs.Other channels of"Luch" facility may also be employed as additional pump of parametric amplifier(s).
References[II
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