Development of a sub-petawatt ultrashort laser facility

Abstract

The paper presents the development of a sub-petawatt ultrashort laser facility, i.e. the upgraded super intense laser for experiment on the extremes (SILEX-I). The facility is a multi-stage Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplification (CPA) laser system. Cross-polarized wave generation was used to improve the temporal contrast. An adaptive optical system was utilized to correct wavefront aberrations and to improve focusability before each shot. After upgrading, the maximum energy is 20.1 J, the recompressed pulse width is 26.8 fs and the peak power is up to 750 TW. The temporal contrast is around 109. The on-target focal spot size (full width at half maximum (FWHM)) is Φ6.5 μm and the focused intensity is greater than 4x1020 W/cm2.