Hannover 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 37: Advanced Concepts for High Peak Power Ultrafast Lasers I

A 37.1: Hauptvortrag

Freitag, 4. März 2016, 11:00–11:50, e415

Exawatt laser concepts for extreme field science — •Chris Barty — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA

This presentation will review worldwide, high-intensity laser activities and introduce new concepts that will enable extension of existing petawatt laser capabilities to the exawatt scale. Modern inertial confinement fusion lasers based on Nd:glass have amplification bandwidths that are capable of supporting pulses of less than a picosecond in duration. With the implementation of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), it is possible for beam lines at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Laser Mega-Joule (LMJ) facility in Bordeaux, France, the LFEX laser at the Institute for Laser Engineering in Osaka, Japan and the Omega EP facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester, New York to create petawatt peak power laser pulses of nominally 1-ps duration and 1-kJ energy [1]. While these systems are at the forefront of present high-energy, high-peak power capabilities, they utilize only a small fraction of the potential of the underlying Nd:glass laser amplification system and as such are very inefficient. A single beam line at the NIF, for example, has a stored energy in excess of 25 kJ. This presentation describes short pulse amplification architectures based on chirped *beams* [2], novel pulse compressors and existing beam phasing technologies that are capable of extracting the full, stored energy of a NIF or NIF-like beam line and in doing so produce from one beam line a near-diffraction-limited, laser pulse whose peak power would be in excess of 200 petawatts or 0.2 exawatts. This architecture is well suited to either low-f-number focusing or to mulit-beam, dipole focusing concepts [3]. With dipole focusing, it is anticipated that a single beam line of a large-aperture, mixed-glass exawatt-scale system will be capable of reaching intensities in excess of 1026 W/cm2 or more than 5 orders of magnitude beyond that possible from existing CPA based PW systems at NIF, LMJ, LFEX and Omega EP. At such intensities proton motion becomes relativistic during interactions with the laser pulse. Full extraction of beam line energy will also be enabling to full scale demonstration of fast ignition concepts, etc.

This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

[1] D. Zuegel, S. Borneis, C. P. J. Barty, B. Legarrec, C. Danson, N. Miyanaga, P. K. Rambo, C. Le Blanc, T. J. Kessler, A. W. Schmid, L. J. Waxer, J. H. Kelly, B. Kruschwitz, R. Jungquist, E. Moses, J. Britten, I. Jovanovic, J. Dawson, and N. Blanchot, "Laser challenges for fast ignition," Fusion Science and Technology 49, 453-482 (2006) [2] C. P. J. Barty *Optical Chirped Beam Amplification and Propagation.* US Patent #6,804,045 B2, (2004) University of California. [3] A.Gonoskov, A. Bashinov, I. Gonoskov, C. Harvey, A. Ilderton,A. Kim, M. Marklund, G. Mourou, and A. Sergeev Phys.Rev.Lett. 113, 014801 (2014)