A multistep pulse compressor for 10s to 100s PW lasers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multistep pulse compressor design that significantly increases the achievable peak power of petawatt lasers, enabling new frontiers in ultra-intense laser physics research.

Contribution

The proposed multistep pulse compressor combines a prism pair, a four-grating compressor, and a spatiotemporal focusing self-compressor to enhance energy handling and simplify the optical setup.

Findings

Achieves up to 100 PW single-beam laser output.

Enables over 150 PW with beam combining techniques.

Simplifies compressor design and improves stability.

Abstract

High-energy tens (10s) to hundreds (100s) petawatt (PW) lasers are key tools for exploring frontier fundamental researches such as strong-field quantum electrodynamics (QED), and the generation of positron-electron pair from vacuum. Recently, pulse compressor became the main obstacle on achieving higher peak power due to the limitation of damage threshold and size of diffraction gratings. Here, we propose a feasible multistep pulse compressor (MPC) to increase the maximum bearable input and output pulse energies through modifying their spatiotemporal properties. Typically, the new MPC including a prism pair for pre-compression, a four-grating compressor (FGC) for main compression, and a spatiotemporal focusing based self-compressor for post-compression. The prism pair can induce spatial dispersion to smooth and enlarge the laser beam, which increase the maximum input and output pulse energies. As a result, as high as 100 PW laser with single beam or more than 150 PW through combining two beams can be obtained by using MPC and current available optics. This new optical design will simplify the compressor, improve the stability, and save expensive gratings/optics simultaneously. Together with the multi-beam tiled-aperture combining method, the tiled-grating method, larger gratings, or negative chirp pulse based self-compression method, several 100s PW laser beam is expected to be obtained by using this MPC method in the future, which will further extend the ultra-intense laser physics research fields.