Abstract
A terawatt XeCl laser system, which consists of a subpicosecond dye oscillator-amplifier system, a small-aperture XeCl preamplifier, and a large-aperture final amplifier with a gain cross-section of 10cm×10cm, is described. The characteristics of optical pulses are given at each stage of the XeCl laser system, based on autocorrelation, spectrum, and energy mesurements. An energy output of 340mJ in a beam cross-section of 7cm×10cm is obtained by double-pass amplification of a 310fs pulse in the final amplifier. The system withouta preamplifier leads to a terawatt-class subpicosecond pulse with a high contrast ratio of > 100 : 1 relative to ASE background and an output energy of 195mJ.
