Search

High intensity and high energy laser facilities place increasing demands on optical components, requiring large surface area optics with exacting specifications. Petawatt lasers are high energy, short-pulse laser systems generally based on chirped-pulse amplification, where an initial low energy short pulse is stretched, amplified, and then recompressed to produce fs to ps high-power laser pulses. In such petawatt lasers, the highest demands are placed on the final optics, including gratings which compress the pulses and mirrors which direct and focus the final high-power beams. The limiting factor in these optical components is generally laser-induced damage. Designing and fabricating these optical components to meet reflection, dispersion, and other requirements while meeting laser-induced damage requirements is the primary challenge discussed in this tutorial. We will introduce the reader to the technical challenges and tradeoffs required to produce mirrors for petawatt lasers and discuss current research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on the first direct voltage and current measurements from a laser-generated magnetic field coil target. The magnetic field was observed to scale with the laser intensity as B ∝ I laser 0.66 ± 0.13 . This scaling relation can be derived from the measured voltage approximated by the laser-heated plasma electron temperature T e. The experiments used a 1053 nm laser with pulse lengths ranging from 0.5 to 20 ns and intensities ranging from 10 9 to 10 14 W / cm 2 to generate an electric potential that drives current through the coil. We show that the behavior of the coil can be described with a lumped-element circuit model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]