Speaker
Description
Ultrafast lasers with both high average and peak power are necessary to drive laser wakefield acceleration. Fiber lasers have recently demonstrated potential to meet such challenging demands, but they still run into the primary roadblock of lower temporal contrast, a key parameter for characterizing pre- and pedestal pulses which cause pre-ionization of the target gas. Second harmonic generation (SHG) remains the standard choice for significantly improving contrast due to the intensity-squared scaling of contrast enhancement, as well as bottlenecking any pedestals with unsuitable nonlinear pulse characteristics. We present results of SHG from a spatially combined, coherent pulse-stacked femtosecond laser (10 mJ, 300 fs, 1 kHz) developed by the University of Michigan. We also estimate contrast enhancement by directly comparing the SHG pulse to the fundamental pulse.
| Working group | WG1 |
|---|