Greater than Five-Order-of-Magnitude Postcompression Temporal Contrast Improvement with an Ionization Plasma Grating
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: High-intensity lasers require suppression of prepulses and other nonideal temporal structure to avoid target disruption before the arrival of the main pulse. To address this, we demonstrate that ionization gratings act as a controllable optical switch for high-power light with a temporal contrast improvement of at least 3×10^{5} and a switching time less than 500 fs. We also show that a grating system can run for hours at 10 Hz without degradation. The contrast improvement from an ionization grating compares favorably to that achievable with plasma mirrors.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G1088636562, ECLIPSE: Miniaturization of Ultra-High-Power Laser Systems with Plasma Grating Chirped Pulse Amplification, G1356433355, G14554683, G2145270357, G217780377, Modified Plasma Mirrors to Maximize Efficiency of High Harmonic Generation in Solids, Relativistic Plasma Optics with Structured Light, G4692186501, THIS PROJECT AIMS TO ADVANCE THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF PLASMA AND USE THAT UNDERSTANDING TO DEVELOP COMPACT PLASMA-BASED OPTICAL COMPONENTS FOR HIGH-POWER LASERS. TO STUDY PLASMA OPTICS IN A ROBUST WAY, THIS PROJECT WILL COMBINE EXPERIMENTAL HARDWARE AND A SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK THAT ALLOW HIGH-REPETITION-RATE EXPERIMENTS AND EFFICIENT EXAMINATION OF LARGE PARAMETER SPACES, WITH A GOAL OF DEVELOPING GENERALIZED TOOLS FOR CONDUCTING HIGH-REPETITION-RATE HIGH-ENERGY-DENSITY SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS. ULTIMATELY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY WILL TRY TO INCREASE THE VIABILITY OF PLASMA OPTICS AS OPTICAL COMPONENTS BY USING ADAPTIVE EXPERIMENTS AND SIMULATIONS TO IMPROVE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LASER-INDUCED PLASMA STRUCTURES AND NONLINEAR PLASMA OPTICS, DEVELOP METHODS FOR CONTROL OF OPTICALLY INDUCED PLASMAS, AND EXPLORE THE DYNAMICS OF COMPLEX PLASMA STRUCTURES IN HIGH-INTENSITY ENVIRONMENTS., G753778647, Exploring Entangled X-ray Light Generation Through Combined Relativistic Plasma Science and Quantum Optics Approaches, G8756112931, G991281326
OpenAlex ID: W4403204509