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.
