Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
The generation of multi-terawatt, sub-picosecond laser pulses was until recently only possible at large facilities due to the major infrastructure and personnel demands. However, in the past decade, the Ti:Sa laser technology, delivering hundreds of terawatts, has become commercially available. Owing to the short laser pulse lengths (tens of femtoseconds), the energy requirements are thus kept at the level of a few joules, making the infrastructure and personnel demands affordable and attractive at an university-scale laboratory. The combination of ultrashort pulse duration and the high peak power achieved nowadays[
In this paper we present the up-to-date, multi-beam architecture of the ARCTURUS laser facility and the operational physical parameters of the laser beams. The interaction of the pulses with solid, cluster and gaseous targets was extensively investigated and a brief overview of the recent experimental studies performed in either a single- or multi-beam configuration is presented. The great versatility of the laser system is shown by the different experimental configurations used for various interaction conditions.
2 Double-CPA architecture of the ARCTURUS laser system
The ARCTURUS laser facility located at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany is a university-based laser laboratory dedicated to the study of the interactions of high-power, high-contrast laser pulses with matter at intensities which can exceed
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2.1 First CPA module
The seed pulse originates from a commercial Ti:Sa oscillator pumped by a CW diode pumped solid state laser (DPSS) which delivers sub-20 fs, 5 nJ pulses with a spectral bandwidth of about
In the ARCTURUS laser chain, the laser contrast is improved by two main stages. Firstly, at the front end of the laser system, the contrast is controlled by saturable absorbers, Pockels cells and, recently, by an XPW module. Most of temporal profile quality of the output pulses is defined at this stage. The second contrast improvement is achieved by a single plasma mirror system, which can be inserted in each of the main beam paths after the compressor.
Before the XPW module implementation, the intrinsic laser contrast was limited by the regenerative amplifier to
2.2 Cross-polarized wave filter
The XPW module is based on the third-order nonlinear effect of cross-polarized wave generation (XPW) in a
The contribution of the XPW module to the beam temporal profile was studied. In the double-CPA architecture, the laser pulse was firstly temporally characterized by bypassing the XPW module and removing the SA after regen 2, in the so-called low-contrast configuration (red trace in Figure
2.3 Main amplification stage
After the XPW module, the pulse is recollimated and further seeded in a second CPA module where the pulse is again stretched optically by another Öffner-type stretcher to
At this point, the pulse is cleaned by a large-aperture (1 inch, 1 inch
2.4 Spectral and spatial phase compensation: compressors and adaptive optics
All three beam lines have independent delay lines and can be separately compressed by double-pass optical compressors on a four-grating and rooftop mirror arrangement. In order to keep the vacuum compressor chamber and the grating size as small as possible, the compressors have a compact geometry, with the optical path of the stretched pulse folded in two parallel planes on top of each other[
For the highest intensity possible on the target, an aberration-free wavefront which defines the quality of the laser beam focus is important. Essentially, the main contribution to the wavefront distortion originates from the main amplification stage, due to thermal lensing and birefringence effects. The 2D and 3D far-field intensity distributions of the beam 1 at full energy are shown in Figures
2.5 Plasma mirror system
A further contrast enhancement can be achieved by means of a plasma mirror (PM)[
At the ARCTURUS laser system, two identical PM setups are installed in the HP beam lines. A picture of the PM installed in beam line 1 is shown in Figure
The contrast performance of the PM substrate has been investigated and the temporal profiles with and without the PM system included in the beam path are shown in Figure
The high contrast of the interaction beams is of key importance for experiments employing thin foils of nanometer thickness, nano-structured targets, or randomly or periodically modulated surfaces (gratings), preventing the laser pedestal and its rising edge from destroying the target or the surface modulations prior to the arrival of the peak of the pulse[
The damaged area created on the PM substrate acts as on optical isolator for the laser energy backscattered from the interaction region, as the reflectivity of the damaged spot on the PM substrate is very low compared with the PM reflectivity in the operational mode. One may note that the interaction area is located about
3 Versatility of laser parameters in the experimental area and online diagnostics
The amplified, compressed and temporally shaped beams are directed through separate vacuum beam lines to the experimental area, which is a radiation-shielded hall (Figure
The laser architecture allows a flexible selection of the parameters of the beams. In the operation regime without the PM, the beams’ energy can be adjusted by controlling the amplification level. In the interaction area, the energy is typically in the range 1–3 J, but it can be lowered to the millijoule level, depending on the experimental requirements. The beam energy can be reduced in fine steps by employing an attenuator assembly consisting of a large-aperture waveplate and two thin-film polarizers. By means of different focusing optics and geometries, the interaction beams can irradiate the targets at an intensity which can range from the highest achievable
A number of complex experiments based on a counter-propagating geometry (e.g. Thomson scattering, pulse amplification by stimulated Brillouin scattering, studies of radiation reaction and strong field quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects, and counter-propagating shocks dynamics)[
The synchronization of the pulses in the interaction area relies only on the optical path compensation, as all three beams originate from the same front end. The relative delays between the main interaction pulses can be varied in the range
In addition, the pulse duration can be varied from the optimized compressed pulse corresponding to the shortest duration of about
The versatility of the laser parameters generated by the ARCTURUS system can be exploited in a wide variety of experimental studies. Therefore, investigations with a high degree of complexity, such as multi-beam experiments, require an efficient design and handling of the diagnostics. The experimental area contains a number of diagnostics which are either dedicated to a specific chamber (e.g. magnetic spectrometer for proton energy selection in the medical chamber[
A large number of dedicated diagnostics have been developed for investigations of laser-driven radiation sources. Optical spectrometers are used for low-energy radiation detection, e.g. higher-order laser harmonics in the UV spectral range. Various flat-field spectrometers have been built with a spectral resolution up to
4 Examples of experimental results for different interaction configurations
When a laser pulse of an intensity
In the single-main-beam configuration, beam 1 was focused onto solid and gaseous targets to study laser-driven radiation sources. Thanks to the high contrast of the HP beams, targets with random or periodical modulation could preserve their nanometer-scale structures prior to the main pulse and were employed in several investigations ranging from laser energy absorption to high-order harmonic (HH) generation and surface electron acceleration. In the case of rough targets, the laser energy coupling efficiency was measured to be a factor of six larger than in the case of planar targets[
High-energy particle beams were accelerated in the relativistic regime and at various interaction conditions. The effect of the pulse duration on the proton acceleration process was investigated when one of the main pulses was focused onto a
In investigations employing both HP beams, two distinct approaches were pursued: namely interaction physics with both HP beams or pump–probe experiments. In the dual-beam approach, both beams of specific parameters were focused onto the target and, by varying the relative delay between the two HP beams, the plasma parameters can be modified and controlled by the first interaction. Thus, by irradiating the preformed plasma with the second HP beam (synchronized or delayed), novel processes can be studied, including particle acceleration and the emission of high-energy radiation. The dual-beam configuration is perfectly suited for the generation of an ultrashort X-ray source based on radiation frequency upshift of a highly intense laser pulse scattered off a dense population of fast electrons. For this purpose, the pulses were focused counter-propagating onto a thin foil, as is schematically shown in Figure
Moreover, the two-HP-beam configuration offers various possibilities for pump–probe experiments, in particular for proton probing, as the generation of a proton beam requires an HP interaction pulse. Proton radiography is one of the well-established diagnostics in the field of laser-plasma physics for the investigation of highly transient electromagnetic fields generated during the interaction of intense laser pulses with matter[
In a multi-beam configuration, the propagation, spontaneous and stimulated backscatterings of broadband laser pulses in an underdense plasma were investigated, in the context of short-pulse amplification by strongly coupled (sc) stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). All three beams were used: as ionization beam (beam 1), pump (beam 2) and seed (probe beam). The influence of the bandwidth, duration and the chirp of the pulses in the amplification process was studied[
The laser system delivers pulses with a repetition rate of
5 Conclusions
After the recent upgrade, the ARCTURUS laser is a highly versatile, multi-beam, high-contrast and HP laser system. The architecture is based on a double-CPA configuration and an XPW nonlinear filter for the enhancement of the pulse contrast. Due to the front-end design (SAs, Pockels cells) and the XPW module, the temporal profile of the pulse is better than
The laser system delivers three synchronized laser pulses. Two beams can be amplified in separate large amplifiers up to
Benefiting from the large range of laser parameters available and the diagnostic capabilities of the facility, a large number of complex and novel interaction conditions have been explored. A selection of some of the experiments where single, dual or multiple beams were employed is briefly presented. New regimes or physical effects can be created, observed and studied. Although larger petawatt facilities are presently being built or planned for the near future, laser facilities at the hundreds of terawatt scale are still very attractive due to their flexibility, for proof-of-principle experiments of high-complexity, pump–probe experiments, testing targets and diagnostics.
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