Open AccessPedestal cleaning for high laser pulse contrast ratio with a 100 TW class laser system
Author(s) -
S. Fourmaux,
S. Payeur,
S. Buffechoux,
Philippe Lassonde,
C St-Pierre,
F. Martín,
JeanClaude Kieffer
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.19.008486
Subject(s) - laser , optics , materials science , contrast ratio , pulse (music) , amplified spontaneous emission , chirped pulse amplification , injection seeder , ultrafast laser spectroscopy , optoelectronics , ultrashort pulse , physics , detector
Laser matter interaction at relativistic intensities using 100 TW class laser systems or higher is becoming more and more widespread. One of the critical issues of such laser systems is to let the laser pulse interact at high intensity with the solid target and avoid any pre-plasma. Thus, a high Laser Pulse Contrast Ratio (LPCR) parameter is of prime importance. We present the LPCR characterization of a high repetition 100 TW class laser system. We demonstrate that the generated Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) degrades the overall LPCR performance. We propose a simple way to clean the pulse after the first amplification stage by introducing a solid state saturable absorber which results in a LPCR improvement to better than 10(10) with only a 30% energy loss at a 10 Hz repetition rate. We finally correlated this cleaning method with experimental results.