The Vulcan laser has been a tool to preform high energy plasma physics, including among others laboratory astrophysics and particle acceleration. The Petawatt laser beamline/target area is now going to be updated with a new beamline. This new beamline is going to be entirely set upon OPCPA as an amplification technique, and will primarily be dedicated to betatron imaging.
This laser will be used at the same time as a 600 J, PW beamline, a 250J ns beam and a kJ ns long pulse.
Overall we present a PW class OPCPA system comparable with Ti:sapphire laser PW systems, 30J, sub-30fs pulses.
The Petawatt beamline at the Vulcan laser facility is capable of delivering pulses with 500J of energy in <500fs, and has been operational as a user facility since 2003; being used to study laser matter interactions under extreme conditions. In addition to this short-pulse beamline there is a single long pulse beamline capable of 250J with durations from 0.5 to 6ns. In this paper we present our plans to add an auxiliary beamline to this facility based on Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) using LBO as the non-linear crystal. This new beamline will have a dedicated laser area where the seed will be generated, stretched and amplified before being transported to the target area for compression and delivery to target. The beamline will be implemented in 2 phases the first phase will see the development of a 7J <30fs capability with the second phase increasing the delivered energy to 30J. This additional beamline will open up the potential for novel pump probe experiments when operated with the existing PW and long pulse beamlines.
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