OPTIMIZED DESIGN OF A SYSTEM OF GENERATING TERAWATT LASER PULSES BY USE OF OPTICAL PARAMETRIC CHIRPED PULSE AMPLIFICATION

Using the numerical method, an optimized design is presented for the generation of peak powers up to 60 TW with pulse duration 25 fs using an optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier (OPCPA) pumped by the high-power Nd:glass laser. The OPCPA system consists of an LBO preamplifier and an LBO power amplifier. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that this system can scale the pulse energy at nanojoule level to the joule level and generate terawatt pulses. So it provides great po-tential to efficiently produce and amplify very short femtosecond laser pulses, and can be regarded as a step toward generating petawatt laser pulses using optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers pumped by powerful nanosecond systems.