Abstract

We have been developing a PW Nd:glass laser system, which can deliver 1 PW output with 500 J in 0.5 ps, to investigate a fast ignitor concept of laser fusion.¹ The OPCPA^2,3 has apparent advantages over the current schemes for high energy ultrafast pulse amplification. The advantages of OPCPA technique are (1) high gain in a singlepass amplification, (2) high beam quality due to a low heat deposition, (3) small B-integral, (4) high contrast ratio (low levels of pre-pulses and amplifier spontaneous emission), and (5) especially the extremely broad gain bandwidth. The OPCPA gain is higher than the regenerative amplifier or multi-pass amplifier and more stable to Ti:Al₂O₃ laser system at 1 μm. The OPCPA system using large-size KDP crystal is possible to obtain of over multi-PW level. We have developed high-gain pre-amplifier using OPCPA. Here the front-end system based on the chirped pulse optical parametric amplification and the experimental results on OPCPA are presented.

© 2002 Optical Society of America