Petawatt lasers based on hybrid, OPCPA-Nd:glass amplification

A Petawatt laser based on hybrid optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) and mixed Nd:glass has been demonstrated. This concept enables peak powers which can be scaled significantly beyond one petawatt. Higher power lasers enable access to unprecedented scientific research in the studies of high intensity physics. In this paper we discuss the laser, the potential of scaling to higher peak power and the first experiments. The laser system starts with a 100 fs pulses centered around 1058 nm from a commercial tunable Titanium:sapphire oscillator which are stretched to 112 ps/nm or about 1.8 ns. The bandwidth of the output pulse is sufficient for 115 fs pulses.