Xudong Xie

Progress on developing a PW ultrashort laser facility with ns, ps, and fs outputting pulses

A petawatt laser facility with three beams for fast ignition research and strong-field physics applications has been designed and is being constructed. The first beam (referred as SILEX-I) is a Ti:sapphire femto-second laser which pulse width is 30 fs, and till now, output power has reached to 330 TW. The other two beams are Nd3+:glass lasers which output energy are larger than 1kJ and pulse width are about 1ps and 1ns respectively. By using the technology of OPA pumped by 800nm femtosecond laser and seeded by super-continuum spectrum white light, the three beams are synchronized with each other without jitter time. By using the seeds from OPA pumped by femtosecond laser, and by using the pre-amplification stage of OPCPA, the signal to noise ratio of the Nd3+:glass petawatt laser will reach to 108. Active methods are taken to control the gain narrowing effect of the Nd3+:glass amplifiers, giving the option to compress the chirped pulse to ultrashort pulse with width less than 400fs. Tiled multilayer dielectric coating gratings are used for the compressor of the PW beam, which has been successfully demonstrated on a 100J picosecond Nd3+:glass laser system.

Progress on the XG-III high-intensity laser facility with three synchronized beams

The paper presents the technical design and progress on a special high-power laser facility, i.e. XG-III, which is being used for high-field physics research and fast ignition research. The laser facility outputs synchronized nanosecond, picosecond and femtosecond beams with three wavelengths, i.e. 527 nm, 1053 nm and 800 nm respectively, and multiple combinations of the beams can be used for physics experiments. The commissioning of the laser facility was completed by the end of 2013. The measurement results show that the main parameters of the three beams are equal to or greater than the designed ones.

Process-oriented adaptive optics control method in the multi-pass amplifiers

In this talk, we propose and demonstrate the process-oriented adaptive optics (AO) wavefront control method, for optimizing the beam quality in the multi-pass amplifiers. Different from the conventional target-oriented wavefront control approach, the novel method divides the aberration correction process into several steps, to optimize the wavefront quality in time during the courses of the beams transport and amplification. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively prevent the beam quality from worsening and ensure the successful reality of multi-pass amplification, so it has obvious advantages both in efficiency and accuracy over the traditional target-oriented method.

Damage behavior of Nd:glass of high-power disk amplifier medium in ICF Facility

Large aperture Nd:glass disk is often used as the amplifier medium in the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) facilities. The typical size of Nd:glass is up to 810mm×460mm×40mm and more than 3,000 Nd:glass components are needed in the ICF facility. At present, the 3ω fused silica glass and DKDP crystal are mainly responsible for the damage of driver used for ICF. However, with the enlargement of the facility and increase of laser shot number, the laser damage of Nd:glass at 1ω waveband is still an important problem to limit the stable operation of facility and improvement of laser beam quality. In this work, the influence of Nd:glass material itself, mechanical processing, service environment, and laser beam quality on its damage behavior is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The results and conclusions can be summarized as follows: (1) It is very important to control the concentration of platinum impurity particles during melting and the sputtering effect of the cladding materials. (2) The number and length of fractural and brittle scratches should be strictly suppressed during mechanical processing of Nd:glass. (3) The B-integral of high power laser beam should be rigorously controlled. Particularly, the top shape of pulses must be well controlled when operating at high peak laser power. (4) The service environment should be well managed to make sure the cleanness of the surface of Nd:glass better than 100/A level during mounting and running. (5) The service environment and beam quality should be monitored during operation.

Broadband chirped pulse amplification at high energy Nd:glass amplifier system

We demonstrated high energy broadband chirped pulse amplification at Nd:glass amplifiers system with domestic N31 glass. Seed pulse generated by femtosecond-pulse-pumped optical parametric amplification was finally amplified up to 168J with spectral width 5.5nm by CPA. The amplified chirped pulse was successfully recompressed to less than 1ps by tiled gratings compressor.

Design and construction of a PW ultrashort laser facility with ns, ps, and fs outputting pulses

A petawatt laser facility with three beams for fast ignition research and strong-field physics applications has been designed and is being constructed. The first beam (referred as SILEX-I) is a Ti:sapphire femto-second laser which pulse width is 30 fs, and till now, output power has reached to 330 TW. The other two beams are Nd3+:glass lasers which output energy are larger than 1kJ and pulse width are about 1ps and 1ns respectively. By using the technology of OPA pumped by 800nm femtosecond laser and seeded by super-continuum white light (SWL), the three beams are synchronized with each other without jitter time. Tiled multilayer dielectric coating gratings are used for the compressor of the PW beam.