Further Development of the Short‐Pulse Petawatt Laser: Trends, Technologies, and Bottlenecks

Abstract

The petawatt (PW) laser has experienced a rapid development in the past two decades, and tens of giant facilities have been constructed worldwide. After realizing 10–100 PW, it seems to be close to some sort of engineering limit but its focused peak intensity still is much lower than the Schwinger limit, and therefore some technology improvements or innovations become indispensable for further increasing the peak power as well as the focused peak intensity. By quick reviewing the development of the PW laser in history, it is shown that reducing the pulse duration to near a single optical cycle is a feasible (easy and cheap) choice for this purpose. Here, technologies for the optical‐cycle pulse generation, ultrabroadband amplification, and capability boosting that aim to provide possible approaches for optical‐cycle PW lasers are briefly reviewed and discussed. Meanwhile, key bottlenecks that challenge the current as well as the future short‐pulse PW lasers and their possible solutions are summarized and discussed. This technology review aims to provide a possible roadmap for the next‐stage development of the short‐pulse PW laser.

Control systems and data management for high-power laser facilities

“…Tackling the obstacles to achieving multi-Hz repetitionrate high-intensity laser-plasma interactions has been a focus of the high-power laser community in recent years. Great progress has been shown in laser technology [22] , replenishing targets [23][24][25][26][27][28][29] and online diagnostics [30][31][32][33] . The increasing availability of experimental facilities compatible with high repetition rates now highlights the need to adjust traditional experimental practices, and control, in order to fully exploit the opportunities offered by these systems [34] .…”

Electron pulse train accelerated by a linearly polarized Laguerre–Gaussian laser beam

“…The construction of numerous high-power laser systems around the world [1,2,3,4] has enabled the development of novel particle (see [5,6] and refs. therein) and radiation sources [7,8,9,10,11,12] for multidisciplinary applications [13,14].…”

“…The construction of numerous high-power laser systems around the world [ 1 – 4 ] has enabled the development of novel particle (see reports of Bulanov et al . [ 5 ] and Esarey et al .…”

“…The construction of numerous high-power laser systems around the world [1][2][3][4] has enabled the development of novel particle (see reports of Bulanov et al [5] and Esarey et al [6] and references therein) and radiation sources [7][8][9][10][11][12] for multidisciplinary applications [13,14] . Most of the improvements of the laser beams used for driving laser-matter interactions have been focused on increasing power, on-target intensity, total energy and the contrast of the compressed pulse.…”

“…Most of the improvements of the laser beams used for driving laser-matter interactions have been focused on increasing power, on-target intensity, total energy and the contrast of the compressed pulse. For example, the proposed facility [3,4] that aims to cross the 100 PW limit is expected to be in development over the next decade. Concurrently, new optical techniques for producing helical wave-fronts [15][16][17][18][19][20] are also being developed.…”