Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
The power and, hence, the focal intensity of petawatt and multipetawatt lasers are currently limited by the size and damage threshold of compressor diffraction gratings[1]. A multifold power enhancement can be achieved using mosaic gratings in the compressor or several parallel chirped pulse amplification (CPA) channels, each of which ends with a conventional compressor of its own. In these cases, the power of the pulse increases as a result of increasing energy, while its duration remains unchanged. This approach entails a multiple increase in complexity, size, and price. An alternative recently developing approach, within the framework of which power is enhanced due to reduced pulse duration after the compressor, rather than due to energy increase, is free from these drawbacks. This approach has different names/acronyms: thin film compression (TFC)[2], compression after compressor approach (CafCA)[3], or post-compression[4]. The corresponding technique is as follows: the pulse spectrum is broadened as a result of self-phase modulation (SPM) during propagation in a medium with Kerr nonlinearity and is then compressed due to reflection from chirped mirrors (CMs) with negative dispersion.
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