Quick Shot
MTW-OPAL Featured on High Power Laser Science and Engineering Cover
January 10, 2022
The cover image on High Power Laser Science and Engineering features Mike Spilatro and Ben Webb installing a vacuum-compatible SPIDER diagnostic into the MTW-OPAL grating compressor chamber for temporal pulse measurements at full power. The featured data line shows the time-domain reconstruction of the amplified and compressed pulse as measured by the SPIDER diagnostic; First Light Campaign results demonstrated >7-J pulse energies with pulse durations <20 fs.
MTW-OPAL: a technology development platform for ultra-intense optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification systems by Jake Bromage et al., was chosen to be featured on the cover of High Power Laser Science and Engineering.
MTW-OPAL is the midscale prototype of a proposed full-scale system, EP-OPAL, where two of the four OMEGA EP beams are used to pump the final noncollinear optical parametric amplifiers (NOPA’s) for 2 × 25-PW beams. MTW-OPAL was designed to produce 0.5‑PW pulses with technologies scalable to tens of petawatts. A key subsystem is the final large-aperture NOPA, where a deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate (DKDP) crystal is pumped by the neighboring narrowband MTW laser to produce broadband pulses with >150 nm of bandwidth. This technology can be scaled to enable broadband gain for kilojoule–femtosecond systems.
Ultra-broadband transport optics, compressor gratings, and diagnostic tools compatible with the EP-OPAL system are an active area of development currently being explored using the MTW-OPAL system. The MTW-OPAL First Light Campaign concluded with a successful demonstration of 0.35-PW peak power. Next steps include developing hardware and techniques for f/2 focusing with a deformable mirror and a double plasma mirror system to achieve ultrahigh-contrast focused intensities >5 × 1021 W/cm2.
This is the second time that work from LLE was featured on the cover of High Power Laser Science and Engineering.