Compressing all the energy of a laser pulse into a spatiotemporal focal cube edged by the laser center wavelength will realize the highest intensity of an ultra-intense ultrashort laser, which is called the λ3 regime or the λ3 laser. Herein, we introduced a rotational hyperbolic mirror—an important rotational conic section mirror with two foci—that is used as a secondary focusing mirror after a rotational parabolic mirror to reduce the focal spot size from several wavelengths to a single wavelength by significantly increasing the focusing angular aperture. Compared with the rotational ellipsoidal mirror, the first focal spot with a high intensity, as well as some unwanted strong-field effects, is avoided. The optimal focusing condition of this method is presented and the enhanced tight focusing for a femtosecond petawatt laser and the λ3 laser is numerically simulated, which can enhance the focused intensities of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for laser physics.
After reaching a world record of 10 PW, the peak power development of the titanium-sapphire (Ti:sapphire) PW ultraintense lasers has hit a bottleneck, and it seems to be difficult to continue increasing due to the difficulty of manufacturing larger Ti:sapphire crystals and the limitation of parasitic lasing that can consume stored pump energy. Unlike coherent beam combining, coherent Ti:sapphire tiling is a viable solution for expanding Ti:sapphire crystal sizes, truncating transverse amplified spontaneous emission, suppressing parasitic lasing, and, importantly, not requiring complex space-time tiling control. A theoretical analysis of the above features and an experimental demonstration of high-quality laser amplification are reported. The results show that the addition of a 2×2 tiled Ti:sapphire amplifier to today’s 10 PW ultraintense laser is a viable technique to break the 10 PW limit and directly increase the highest peak power recorded by a factor of 4, further approaching the exawatt class.
Compressing high-energy laser pulses to a single cycle will break the current limitation of super-scale projects and facilitate future Exawatt lasers. However, the lack of ultra-broadband gratings capable of supporting single-cycle pulse stretching and compression is a core problem that cannot be overcome. Recently, we solved this problem and developed gratings with the broadest bandwidth (broader than 400 nm) that can support near-single-cycle laser pulses (about 4 fs). A 200 mm (Length) ultra-broadband grating is being fabricated supporting a single-cycle terawatt-level prototype. Meanwhile, the 1600 mm (Length) fabrication campaign is underway and will be completed in 2024–2025 at SIOM, facilitating the single-cycle Exawatt lasers.
Conference Committee Involvement (3)
Advanced Lasers, High-Power Lasers, and Applications XV
12 October 2024 | Nantong, Jiangsu, China
Advanced Lasers, High-Power Lasers, and Applications XIV
14 October 2023 | Beijing, China
Advanced Lasers, High-Power Lasers, and Applications XIII
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