Laboratoire d'utilisation des lasers intenses. ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE. Unité
Mixte de Recherche n° 7605 CNRS - CEA -. École Polytechnique – UPMC Paris.
Laboratoire d’utilisation des lasers intenses ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE
Unité Mixte de Recherche n° 7605 CNRS - CEA École Polytechnique – UPMC Paris
Conférence au LULI Bâtiment 403, Campus de l’Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau le 21 Mars 2013 à 10 h
The Penelope Project, 150 J / 150 fs / 1 Hz
Daniel Albach Institute of Radiation Physics - Laser Particle Acceleration Division Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR), Allemagne
The PENELOPE (Petawatt, Energy-Efficient Laser for Optical Plasma Experiments) project, an all diode pumped laser system currently under development at the Helmholtz-Zentrum DresdenRossendorf in Germany is dedicated to generate 150 fs long pulses with energies of up to 150 J at repetition rates of up to 1 Hz. One of the major challenges is the architecture of the main amplifiers boosting the energy to the desired level while not sacrificing the necessary bandwidth and preserving the quality of the laser pulse. In order to keep the necessary bandwidth, choices for a diode pumped laser system doped with Yb3+ is relatively limited to a few materials. In contrast to laser systems aiming on high energies and long pulses, like Lucia in France, Genbu in Japan and Dipole in the UK, using Yb3+ doped YAG in the ns regime, and Polaris in Germany using glass in the fs regime, CaF2 was chosen instead. It has a significantly longer life time and broader emission bandwidth for ultrashort laser pulses. Our main interest lies in the quest for scalability of such Yb3+ doped CaF2, especially in the range of up to a few hundred joules. Besides the impact of thermal lensing on the beam quality and Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) on the energy storage, thermally induced depolarization losses are one of the main problems to overcome for such high average power laser amplifiers. The talk will present the current status of the laser development of the PENELOPE laser system and an outlook for the foreseen amplifier design.
Diode Laser modules with a total of 600 kW peak power on the optical table Laboratoire d’utilisation des lasers intenses - Ecole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau cedex, France Tél : + 33 1 69 33 53 00 - Fax : + 33 1 69 33 54 82 - Courriel :
[email protected]
