The world’s first petawatt laser was put together in 1996 re-purposing one beamline of the existing Nova Nd:glass laser facility based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The Vulcan 100 TW laser from the early/mid-1990s showing the first ever single-pass CPA compressor system with one grating in air (centre) and the second in vacuum (bottom right) (picture courtesy of STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory). Various geometries of stretcher were then developed, such as the Offner triplet, allowing longer stretches to be realized and hence more energy to be generated.įigure 3. These new ultra-short-pulse oscillator systems did away with the need to use self-phase modulation to spectrally broaden the pulse. Other developments around this time included a neodymium-based additive-pulse mode-locking system which could generate pulses at under 0.5 ps at 1054 nm. These systems could either directly seed Ti:sapphire amplifiers or, if tuned to 1054 nm, be used to seed existing large-aperture Nd:glass systems. ![]() This naturally led to Ti:sapphire mode-locked oscillators which allowed much shorter pulses to be produced. ![]() In the 2015 review paper ‘Petawatt Class Lasers Worldwide’ a comprehensive overview of the current status of high-power facilities of $$1100 nm) that is much larger than other materials and absorbs conveniently at frequency-doubled Nd wavelengths.
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