New grating compressor designs for XCELS and SEL-100 PW projects

TL;DR

This paper analytically optimizes four-grating laser pulse compressors, demonstrating that Littrow configuration outperforms Treacy design, leading to higher pulse powers for XCELS and SEL-100 projects.

Contribution

It provides an analytical solution for optimizing four-grating pulse compressors, comparing two configurations and identifying the superior Littrow design for maximum power.

Findings

Littrow compressor achieves higher pulse power than Treacy design.

Optimal design enables 109 PW for XCELS and 115 PW for SEL-100.

Analytical approach simplifies the optimization process.

Abstract

The problem of optimizing the parameters of a laser pulse compressor consisting of four identical diffraction gratings is solved analytically. The goal of optimization is to obtain maximum pulse power, completely excluding both beam clipping on gratings and the appearance of spurious diffraction orders. The analysis is carried out in a general form for an out-of-plane compressor. Two particular plane cases attractive from a practical point of view are analyzed in more detail: a standard Treacy compressor (TC) and a compressor with an angle of incidence equal to the Littrow angle (LC). It is shown that in both cases the LC is superior to the TC. Specifically, for 160-cm diffraction gratings, optimal LC design enables 109 PW for XCELS and 115 PW for SEL-100 PW, while optimal TC design enables 86 PW for both projects.