The 10 PW laser system under construction for ELI-Beamlines will exhibit output pulses delivered every minute with an energy of 1.5 kJ within 150 fs duration. The laser is a hybrid OPCPA/glass laser system. Here we present results on the high repetition rate front-end and on the first power amplifier.

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The National Laboratory on High Power Laser and Physics has succeeded to build up two ultrashort high power laser facilities with various technologies: the SG-II PW facility and SG-II 5 PW facility. SGII PW facility now can deliver petawatt laser pulses of kilojoules in several picoseconds duration. The focused intensity exceeds 1020 W/cm2 with a contrast 108:1 and has realized proton acceleration of 54 MeV in recent experiments. SG-II 5 PW facility will provide multi-petawatt laser pulses of hundreds of joules in femtosecond duration. The prior two phases has been established and reaches 1.76 PW with pulse width 21 fs. In this paper, we present the detail specifications and current developments of the two facilities, respectively.

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The OPCPA/Ti:sapphire hybrid laser system (named J-KAREN-P laser system) is an infrastructure aiming to realize experiments achieving 1022 W/cm2 at 0.1 Hz. 63 J broadband pulse energies at 0.1 Hz, 30 fs compressed pulse duration, and ~1012 contrast on a sub-nanosecond time scale have been demonstrated. Ultra-high intensities of 1022 W/cm2 by focusing a wave-front corrected 0.3 PW laser beam with an f/1.3 off-axis parabolic mirror can be provided with this system. The fundamental processes of laser-matter interaction at 1022 W/cm2 intensities belong to an absolutely new branch of science that will be the principal research task of the infrastructure.

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The HAPLS laser system has been commissioned to its first integrated performance milestone, delivering laser pulses with 16 J sub-30 fs duration at a 3.3 Hz repetition rate. This triggered the delivery to ELI Beamlines where it will be integrated with the facility and ramped to its full performance. This first alldiode- pumped petawatt-class laser offers the repetition rates required for driving secondary source efficiently with flux relevant or real world applications.

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We report on a detailed analysis of the influence of the random spectral phase noise on temporal contrast of an ultra-high intensity laser pulse. We accurately evaluate the impact of stretcher and compressor optics on the contrast pedestal of the ultra-high intensity laser pulse by precise quantitative characterization of the optics surface. The surface roughness of tens of nanometers on the stretcher and compressor optics causes random spectral phase noise, which reduce the temporal coherence of the main pulse and generates a noisy structure around the main pulse. A degradation of a few orders of magnitude is estimated with the random spectral phase noise.

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We report on the status of ion acceleration carried out with the J-KAREN-P laser facility at National Institute for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST) during the commissioning periods of the system. The system can provide PW peak power at 0.1 Hz on target and can deliver short pulses with an energy of 30 J and pulse duration of 30 fs after compression with a contrast level of better than 1012. The current experiment was performed with the laser intensity of up to ~5 × 1021 Wcm‒2 with and energy of ~9 J on target. The interaction with a 5-μm stainless steel tape target provides electrons with a typical temperature of more than 10 MeV and energetic proton beams with typical maximum energies of 40 MeV with good reproducibility. The protons are accelerated in the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration regime, which is suitable for many applications suitable for many applications including an injector for medical use, which is one of our objectives.

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UV harmonics and protons are observed with a high-intensity Ti:sapphire laser. High-energy protons are generated with an aluminum thin-foil target. Simultaneously with the high-energy protons the generation of third- and fourth-order harmonics are observed in the reflection direction by using a high-intensity high-contrast laser.

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