Abstract
We have developed the front end of a short- pulse, chirped-pulse amplification system for eventual amplification up to the petawatt level in the Nova laser chain. Low energy amplification is done with Ti:sapphire as the laser medium to avoid gain-narrowing, which limits the compressed pulse duration. Starting with a commercial Ti:sapphire oscillator operating at 1053 nm, the 100 fs, transform limited pulses are stretched to 1 ns in a single grating stretcher and amplified by nearly 109 in a Ti:sapphire regenerative amplifier. An eight-pass Ti:sapphire amplifier increases the energy to 60 mj with essentially no gain narrowing of the stretched pulse. Further amplification in two mixed Nd:glass heads results in Joule-level pulses for injection into Nova.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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