Compact Nd-silicate glass laser facility as synchronous pumping source of 10 TW optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier system

Summary form only given. The CPA (chirped pulse amplification) technique has been widely applied in many high power laser systems from a few TW to 1000 TW in the world. However, those existing systems do not satisfy completely the requirement of low amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) and no amplified prepulses and temporal wings on compressed pulse. Therefore, a new possible approach to achieve very high powers and very short pulses using optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers (OPCPA) was prospected by I.N. Ross et al. (1997). The OPCPA technique is promising for constructing a higher than 100 TW laser system, which is very useful for high intensity physics. We are constructing an OPCPA system generating 10 TW at 1064 nm for validating the possibility. The system is described as following. A 13 W Ar laser pumped self-mode-locked Ti:sapphire oscillator (Mira 900) generating 120 fs, 1 nJ pulses at 1064 nm with the bandwidth of /spl sim/10 nm, a grating pulse stretcher temporally stretched the pulse width to /spl sim/800ps. The stretched pulses were divided into two beams.