Further Development of the Short-Pulse Petawatt Laser: Trends, Technologies, and Bottlenecks

Abstract

The petawatt (PW) laser has experienced a rapid development in the past two decades, and tens of giant facilities have been constructed worldwide. After realizing 10–100 PW, it seems to be close to some sort of engineering limit but its focused peak intensity still is much lower than the Schwinger limit, and therefore some technology improvements or innovations become indispensable for further increasing the peak power as well as the focused peak intensity. By quick reviewing the development of the PW laser in history, it is shown that reducing the pulse duration to near a single optical cycle is a feasible (easy and cheap) choice for this purpose. Here, technologies for the optical-cycle pulse generation, ultrabroadband amplification, and capability boosting that aim to provide possible approaches for optical-cycle PW lasers are briefly reviewed and discussed. Meanwhile, key bottlenecks that challenge the current as well as the future short-pulse PW lasers and their possible solutions are summarized and discussed. This technology review aims to provide a possible roadmap for the next-stage development of the short-pulse PW laser.