This summer marked the 20th anniversary of the first shot of the Multi-Terawatt (MTW) Laser System on July 26, 2004. The shot checked the performance of the 15-cm disk amplifier used to boost the energy of the optical parametric chirped-pulse–amplification (OPCPA) front-end system that was developed as a prototype for the OMEGA EP short-pulse laser. The first target shot of the MTW laser, shot 360, occurred six months later on January 27, 2005 and the shot counter now stands at 17,156 after performing experiments that include laser and laser diagnostic development, target diagnostic development, ultrafast plasma physics, and nonlinear optics.
The MTW laser is one of three midscale lasers, including MTW-OPAL and the fourth-generation laser for ultra-broadband experiments (FLUX), that have proven pivotal to innovating laser technologies at LLE. The MTW-OPAL laser employs the MTW laser operating in a narrowband mode to pump the final stage of an all-OPCPA optical parametric amplifier line (OPAL). MTW-OPAL serves as the prototype front end for NSF OPAL, a proposed new ultra-intense laser user facility with two 25-PW beamlines. FLUX leverages parametric amplification to generate high-energy infrared broadband incoherent pulses that are then frequency converted to the ultraviolet. FLUX started its commissioning experiments and will soon commence plasma-physics and beam-smoothing experiments on OMEGA 60-beam laser. FLUX started its commissioning experiments and will soon commence laser–plasma interaction experiments on the OMEGA 60-beam laser. The FLUX technologies are expected to be at the foundation of a next-generation OMEGA laser.”