Development of a Terawatt Class Sub-10 fs Laser System

Abstract

We have developed an amplifier chain of Ti:Sapphire laser with a spectral width of more than 200 nm, which potentially generates a terawatt sub-10 fs pulse. This laser system consists of a Ti:Sapphire oscillator followed by a pulse stretcher, dispersion compensator with an SLM and the amplifier chain. The first amplifier is a regenerative one pumped by a green laser with energy of 11.5 mJ at 1 kHz. We could successfully compensate for the gain narrowing during regenerative amplification by using high-damage-threshold chirped mirrors and specially designed partial mirrors in the cavity, resulting in pulse energy of 73 µJ. The output pulse is sent to a beam-slicer to reduce the repetition rate to 10 Hz. After 5-pass amplification in a multi-pass amplifier pumped by the second harmonic of a YAG laser with an energy of 180 mJ, we obtained an amplified pulse energy of 30 mJ.