Dispersive Properties of Plasma Diffraction Gratings: Towards Plasma-Based Laser Pulse Compression

TL;DR

This paper investigates plasma diffraction gratings' dispersive properties, demonstrating their potential for ultra-high-power laser pulse compression due to their high damage threshold and favorable optical characteristics.

Contribution

The study provides experimental measurements of plasma gratings' dispersive and diffractive properties, aligning with optical theory and suggesting their use in high-power laser compression.

Findings

Plasma gratings exhibit an angular dispersion of about 0.005 degrees/nm.

Measured properties agree closely with optical theory and simulations.

Design implications point towards plasma gratings enabling petawatt to exawatt laser systems.

Abstract

The standard architecture for a high-peak-power femtosecond laser is chirped pulse amplification using diffraction gratings for compression; the damage threshold of the compression gratings limits current lasers to multi-petawatt peak power. Plasma gratings have orders-of-magnitude higher damage tolerance than conventional optics, so plasma gratings with sufficiently high optical quality could allow the construction of ultra-high-power femtosecond lasers. Here, we present experimental measurements of the angular dispersion, angular bandwidth, and diffraction angles of ionization-based plasma transmission gratings and show that both the dispersive and the diffractive properties of these gratings are in close agreement with optical theory and simulations. Gratings with a period of 10.2 microns are found to have an angular dispersion of approximately 0.005 degrees/nm. The dispersion and bandwidth of these gratings suggest plausible designs for a plasma-grating-based compressor and indicate a pathway to compact lasers with petawatt to exawatt peak power.