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| Home > Publications database > Experimental Results on an OPCPA Seed System for a Laser-Plasma Acceleration Drive Laser |
| Poster | PUBDB-2020-05272 |
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2019
Abstract: Laser-plasma acceleration[1], among others[2,3],promises to be a powerful technology for driving future compact light sources. LUX, which is operated by University of Hamburg,is such a laser-plasma accelerator. It is driven by the 200 TW Ti:Sapphire double chirped pulse amplification (CPA)laser system ANGUS, designed for long-term stability.The laser, as well as the electron beam line,are integrated in a control system, enabling continuous operation for many hours. This has been demonstrated with day-long measurement runs where electron beams with energies above 600 MeV and spontaneous undulator radiation well below 9 nm were achieved [4]. From the long runs large data sets can be collected to provide reliable statistics. To extend the long-term operation abilities of the laser system, and therefore the runtime of the measurement campaigns, we are currently developing a new front end for the ANGUS laser system.With the design approach of the ANGUS laser system in mind we focus on the long-term stability in the development of the new front-end. The target is to reach 35 μJ pulse energy with 20 fs transform limit at 1 kHz close to 800 nm central wavelength. For these parameters and application optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) is a suitable candidate. It has been demonstrated that such systems can be operated for more than a week with stable generation of high contrast ultrafast pulses reaching down to the few cycle regime [5].A measure to get to long-term stability is to use an industrial grade Yb:KGW femto second laser as a common source for white light generation(WLG)and pump for the subsequent OPCPA stages. As only a fraction of the pulse energy emitted by the drive laser is needed for WLG in a bulk YAG crystal to provide the seed, complicated synchronization schemes between two lasers can be avoided.The major part of the pulse energy is converted in a second harmonic generation (SHG)stage to be used as a pump for the OPCPA stages. With headroom to spare the SHG stages can be optimized for stable operation instead of maximum conversion efficiency.Furthermore, without the necessity to reach the few cycle regime, the OPCPA stages can be designed for pulse energy stability instead of maximum amplification bandwidth. Also the fact that no additional laser amplifier stages are needed in the pump arm allows for a compact setup that should be less sensitive on environmental influences. Our approach is unique in the sense, that we focus on maximum stability in parameters, rather than optimizing the setup for minimum pulse lengths or efficiency.Currently we are optimizing the SHG and the OPCPA stages for the stability goals with a 3D+1 split step code.In parallel we are setting up the first prototype OPCPA stage.We will report on simulation as well as experimental results regarding the SHG pump and the firstOPCPA stage with focus on the achievable stability in pulse energy and spectral parameters.[1] W.P. Leemanns et al. “GeV electron beams from a centimetre-scale accelerator”, in Nature Physics 2, 696–699 (2006)[2] A-L. Calendron et al. “Laser system design for table-top X-ray light source”,in High Power Laser Science and Engineering 6: e12 (2018)[3] E. A. Peralta et al.“Demonstration of Electron Acceleration in a Laser-Driven Dielectric Micro-Structure”,Nature 503, 7474 (2013)[4] N. Delbos et al."LUX --A Laser-Plasma Driven Undulator Beamline", Nucl. Instr. Meth. Phys. Res. A 909, 318 (2018)[5]R. Budriūnas et al."53 W average power CEP-stabilized OPCPA system delivering 5.5 TW few cycle pulses at 1 kHz repetition rate”, Opt. Express 25, 5797-5806 (2017)
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