Xueqing Zhao

Progress on high power excimer laser in NINT

Excimer laser has been shown to be efficient tools in plasma physics and material science. Recent progress on techniques of beam control in excimer laser system required for energy scaling are overviewed, Configuration and initial results of a 100J/10ns, 18 beam excimer laser system are given.

Progress on a short pulse excimer laser system with beam smoothing

A short pulse XeCl laser system is being developed for plasma physics and material science study. Partial spatial incoherence seed with short pulse is amplified by MOPA chain including three discharge pumped amplifiers and two electron beam pumped amplifiers for one beam. Final laser output of 5~10J in energy with pulse width of around 10ns has been achieved, which lays a good foundation for full scale construction.

The development and progress of XeCl Excimer laser system

A large angularly multiplexed XeCl Excimer laser system is under development at the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology (NINT). It is designed to explore the technical issues of uniform and controllable target illumination. Short wavelength, uniform and controllable target illumination is the fundamental requirement of high energy density physics research using large laser facility. With broadband, extended light source and multi-beam overlapping techniques, rare gas halide Excimer laser facility will provide uniform target illumination theoretically. Angular multiplexing and image relay techniques are briefly reviewed and some of the limitations are examined to put it more practical. The system consists of a commercial oscillator front end, three gas discharge amplifiers, two electron beam pumped amplifiers and the optics required to relay, encode and decode the laser beam. An 18 lens array targeting optics direct and focus the laser in the vacuum target chamber. The system is operational and currently undergoing tests. The total 18 beams output energy is more than 100J and the pulse width is 7ns (FWHM), the intensities on the target will exceed 1013W/cm2. The aberration of off-axis imaging optics at main amplifier should be minimized to improve the final image quality at the target. Automatic computer controlled alignment of the whole system is vital to efficiency and stability of the laser system, an array of automatic alignment model is under test and will be incorporated in the system soon.

High power excimer laser image relay system analysis using Delano diagram

The characteristics of Delano diagram are especially helpful in instrumental systems type with considerably separated components. For high power excimer laser system, especially for image relay scheme, the Delano diagram method is highly advantageous for the system’s thin lens layout design. A primitive experimental image relay and it’s combination optical layout is investigated in our high power XeCl laser system, with intensity smoothed spatial incoherent source. Instead of the uniform intensity distribution on the target as expected, it is obvious shows in the final image on the target that a gauss like intensity profile and a large amount of astigmatism results. There are two possible reasons: the first one is that not keeping proper relay of pupil plane (or Fourier plane) in the final stage, simply care the collimated beam of virtual object in the final focusing stage. With the help of Delano diagram, it’s clearly shown in the diagram that the Fourier plane and the image plane come very close, indicates that a complete image relay of the object plane and Fourier plane is needed. The second reason is due to the off-axis setup in the large aperture main amplifier, which introduce significant astigmatism aberrations in the final optical path. This question can be solved using proper tilt and de-center of reflective mirror pair setup, and two possible such combination pairs are proposed.

ASE suppression of XeCl excimer laser MOPA system using UV electro-optical switch

In high power eximer laser system, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) decreases the signal contrast ratio severely, leads to waveform broadening and distortion, and impacts on accurate physical experiments. In this article, based on principle of short pulse generation by electro-optical (E-O) switch, a method for ASE suppression of laser amplifiers chain was established. A series of studies on UV electro-optical switches were carried out, and electro-optical (E-O) switches with high extinction ratio were developed. In the waveform clipping experiments of the first pre-amplifier, the extinction ratio of the single and cascaded dual E-O switch reaches 103 and 104 order of magnitude, the laser pulse signal contrast ratio was promoted to 105 and 106 level, respectively. In the experiments of single channel MOPA (Master Oscillator Power Amplifier system), the cascaded dual E-O switch was adopted to suppress ASE of the whole system, and a fine narrow pulse was obtained on the target surface, which gives out one effective solution to the problem of waveform amplification of the high power eximer laser system.

Automatic alignment of double optical paths in excimer laser amplifier

A kind of beam automatic alignment method used for double paths amplification in the electron pumped excimer laser system is demonstrated. In this way, the beams from the amplifiers can be transferred along the designated direction and accordingly irradiate on the target with high stabilization and accuracy. However, owing to nonexistence of natural alignment references in excimer laser amplifiers, two cross-hairs structure is used to align the beams. Here, one crosshair put into the input beam is regarded as the near-field reference while the other put into output beam is regarded as the far-field reference. The two cross-hairs are transmitted onto Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) by image-relaying structures separately. The errors between intersection points of two cross-talk images and centroid coordinates of actual beam are recorded automatically and sent to closed loop feedback control mechanism. Negative feedback keeps running until preset accuracy is reached. On the basis of above-mentioned design, the alignment optical path is built and the software is compiled, whereafter the experiment of double paths automatic alignment in electron pumped excimer laser amplifier is carried through. Meanwhile, the related influencing factors and the alignment precision are analyzed. Experimental results indicate that the alignment system can achieve the aiming direction of automatic aligning beams in short time. The analysis shows that the accuracy of alignment system is 0.63μrad and the beam maximum restoration error is 13.75μm. Furthermore, the bigger distance between the two cross-hairs, the higher precision of the system is. Therefore, the automatic alignment system has been used in angular multiplexing excimer Main Oscillation Power Amplification (MOPA) system and can satisfy the requirement of beam alignment precision on the whole.

The diagnostics of plasmas produced by a high power excimer laser system

A special designed long pulse XeCl MOPA laser system and its initial laser-target experiments are introduced. Laser produced plasmas of carbon, aluminum and copper are concerned. Based on measured results of plasma spectra and framing pictures of ejected plume, Plasma temperature and expanded speed of plasma flume are obtained.

Experimental study on a long-pulse excimer laser system

A four-stage XeCl laser system named Photons has been developed for studying laser interaction with materials. The Photons are outlined and preliminary results characterizing the system are given. The master oscillator Photon-1 can provide “seed” light with laser energy of about 40mJ, pulse duration of about 250ns and good beam quality of nearly diffraction-limited divergence angle and narrow line width less than 1 cm-1 for whole system. The output energy of laser system of 251J has been obtained by four-stage amplification. The synchronization among five lasers is realized by the combination of low voltage timer, high voltage synchronic generators and compensated cables. The demonstration shows Photons good operation with low jitter of less than ±20ns.

Efficient long-pulsed XeCl lasers

Development of a long-pulse spark preionized XeCl-lasers pumped by a self-sustained discharge using a double-discharge circuit is reported. The pre-pulse is formed by novel generator with an inductive energy storage and semiconductor opening switch. The lasers produce up to 1-1.5 J in a pulse with total duration up to 500 ns and total efficiency up to 1.5-2%. Circuit for the discharge current correction is suggested for further extension of the optical pulse. The laser producing 300 ns (FWHM) was used as a master oscillator in a powerful XeCl-laser system.

High-power excimer laser and application

A high power XeCl and KrF excimer lasers pumped by an intense relativistic electron beam have been developed. The pump power density ranges between 1.5 to 2.0 MW/cm3. The maximum output energy of 136 J with the peak power of 1.5 GW is obtained for the XeCl laser. In KrF laser case, the maximum output energy is 157 J and the peak power 2.0 GW. The UV laser interaction with some materials has been studied by this excimer laser.