Development of a two arm, high energy, high power laser for plasma research in India

Abstract

We report here work done towards development of a two arm, high energy, high power Nd:phosphate glass laser system. One arm of the laser is proposed to be operated in a long pulse (∼1.5ns pulse duration) with an energy of ∼400 J. Presently, this arm of the laser is operating at energy of ∼100 J after a disc amplifier that amplifies the laser beam of diameter ∼94 mm. After the addition of two more disc amplifiers which are nearing completion, the laser beam will have energy of ∼400 J, with a beam diameter 140 mm, at an intensity of ∼2 GW/cm2. This beam will be converted to its second harmonic using a 2 × 2 array KDP crystals. The second arm, under development, will operate with a hybrid amplification scheme using optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) and conventional amplification using the existing Nd:glass amplifiers to produce 50 TW, 25 J, 500 fs pulse. A tiled triangular pulse compressor is under development for compressing the stretched pulse.