Speaker
Description
We will present the technology of high power lasers starting from its historical evolution to the contemporary state of the art. High-power lasers arose due to the pursuit of ultra-fast pulses and the need to amplify them for diverse applications.
Several prominent technologies of high power lasers, from solid state Titanium Sapphire to dye compounds, have allowed the generation of ultrashort pulses due to cavity technology innovations like Q-switching and mode-locking. This together with improvement of knowledge of nonlinear effects of intense light in novel optical materials led to dramatic reduction of the time duration of lasers pulses from nano- to pico- and finally femto-seconds.
Amplification of such short pulses were an impossibility until the 80s when the introduction of chirp pulse amplification (CPA) and its subsequent development allowed the production of petawatt level of peak power with femtosecond pulses. These levels of energy intensity on its own opened up the possibility to produce high harmonic generation (HHG) and the shrinking of laser pulses to the attosecond regime.
The structure of the laser systems of several petawatt world-class facilities will be discussed as well as the push of the frontiers in the technologies that need to be improved in order to keep the march toward higher levels of power and efficiency.
