Shanghai Institute Of Optics And Mechanics (SIOM) Makes Technological Progress in Breaking Through The 10-beat-watt Limit Of Ultra-intense Ultrashort Lasers With Titanium Gemstones

Recently, the State Key Laboratory of Strong-Field Laser Physics of Shanghai Institute of Optics and Precision Machinery, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIPM), in cooperation with Shanghai University of Science and Technology (SUST), has made technological progress in breaking through the "10-beat-watt upper limit" of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers in titanium gemstones, and the relevant results are summarized in the article "Coherently tiled Ti : sapphire laser amplification: a way to break the 10 petawatt limit on current ultraintense lasers" was published in Advanced Photonics Nexus and selected as the cover article. cover article.
From the 1-petawatt "Nova" in 1996 to the 10-petawatt "Shanghai Ultra-intense Ultrashort Laser Facility (SULF)" in 2017 and the 10-petawatt "European Union Extreme Light Facility for Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP)" in 2019, he is the founder and CEO of ELI-NP, and the founder of the "Shanghai Ultrashort Laser Facility (SULF)". ELI-NP" in 2019, the significant increase in peak power is due to the change of large-caliber laser gain medium from "neodymium glass" to "titanium gemstone", which makes the pulse width of high-energy laser reduced from about 500 femtoseconds to about 25 femtoseconds. The pulse width of the high energy laser has been reduced from about 500 femtoseconds to about 25 femtoseconds. However, 10 bW appears to be the upper limit of peak power for ultra-intense ultrashort lasers with titanium gemstones. Currently, from the 10-beat-watt to 100-beat-watt development plan, the international generally abandoned the titanium gemstone-based chirped pulse amplification technology Ti:sapphire-CPA, and adopted the optical parametric chirped pulse amplification technology DKDP-OPCPA based on DKDP nonlinear crystals. However, the latter has the disadvantages of low efficiency of "pump-signal" conversion and poor stability of "spatio-temporal-spectral-energy", which pose challenges to the development and application of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers. On the contrary, as a mature technology that has successfully realized the stable output of 10-beat-watt laser, the former still has great potential in the "post-10-beat-watt era".
In order to break through the "10-beat-watt upper limit" of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers with titanium gemstones, the team proposed and validated the Tiled-Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplification (T-CPA) technique, which can not only increase the aperture of titanium gemstones, but also truncate the chirped pulse amplification of titanium gems. gemstone aperture, truncate transverse parasitic oscillations, and circumvent complex spatiotemporal control. The research team has successfully demonstrated the high temporal and spatial performance of T-CPA on a 100 terawatt-class ultra-intense ultrashort laser (UISL) platform and obtained the desired results. This work provides a technical means to break through the "10-megawatt upper limit" of titanium gemstone ultra-intense ultrashort lasers and to develop ultra-intense ultrashort lasers in the 100-megawatt class.