Temporal contrast is an important factor affecting the application of ultraintense and ultrashort laser systems. In this paper, we employ cross-polarized wave (XPW) generation to improve the temporal contrast for ultraintense and ultrashort pulses in a 300 TW Ti:Sapphire laser facility, i.e. the super intense laser for experiment on the extremes (SILEX-I). We designed a double chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system with an intermediate nonlinear temporal pulse filter based on XPW generation and the estimated output energy is more than 300 mJ for the new front-end system. The experimental results show that the output energy of the double CPA system is greater than 370 mJ. The amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) pedestal is suppressed significantly and the temporal contrast is improved by more than two orders of magnitude.

Date Published: 7 September 2011
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 8130, Laser Beam Shaping XII, 813005 (7 September 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.891877

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8130:
Laser Beam Shaping XII
Andrew Forbes; Todd E. Lizotte, Editor(s)