Hybrid lasers
Our hybrid lasers match gaseous iodine laser medium with a solid-state laser medium in a single laser system. A suitable combination of both media is to overcome some of their physical limits. A solid-state laser oscillator, tuned just to the linewidth of 1315 nm of an iodine laser, can seed or replace the iodine laser oscillator, which improves a temporal control of the iodine laser pulses. Such a hybrid iodine laser can involve a solid-state optical parametric solid-state oscillator or a fiber laser.
Fiber laser
Optical parametric oscillator
After replacement of a gaseous iodine oscillator by a solid-state optical parametric oscillator with a pulse energy of 10 mJ, a wavelength of 1315 nm, and a spectral bandwidth of 20 pm we amplified the solid-state laser pulse pulse in a system of two iodine amplifiers to a pulse energy of 30 J and a pulsewidth of 2 ns. The iodine amplifiers with a gain bandwidth of 20 pm and a total gain length of 7 m worked in a regime of a double-pass preamplifier and a single-pass power amplifier.
The hybrid laser was furnished with our automatic motorized system of a spatial and spectral stability of the oscillator beam. A precision of the wavelength stability of the optical parametric oscillator was about 1 pm. Note, that a diameter of a hydrogen atom (H) is about 46 pm and a diameter of a hydrogen molecule (H2) is about 74 pm.
Conversion of iodine laser energy into a femtosecond solid-state laser pulse
It could be profitable to convert, at least partially, the high energy of the iodine laser pulse to a femotsecond pulse, which thus would be amplified to a peak power and intensity getting over 100 TW and 1000 PW/cm2, respectively. The conversion can be arranged using a Ti:sapphire oscillator with a wavelength of 800 nm, for example, and a chain of its solid-state parametric amplifiers matched to their iodine laser pump using a technique of optical parametric chirped pulse amplification.
Two-dimensional-imaging spectrometer
We set up a two-dimensional-imaging spectrometer due to a simple modification of a common optical spectrometer with an exchangeable set of wedged narrowband area filters. Precision of the image resolution was few micrometers or microradians and spectral precision was limited only by a stepping and a bandwidth of the filters. The spectrometer enabled a precise measurement of spatial, angular dispersions of femtosecond laser pulses, for example, or a measurement of dispersion parameters of optical systems.
Probe diagnostic beam of femtosecond laser pulses
We prepare a laser synchronization unit coupling a single-shot pulse of the iodine laser and probe pulses of a femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser (a wavelength of 800 nm, a repetition rate of 80 MHz, and a pulsewidth of 30 fs). The unit will enable to increase a temporal resolution of high-energy iodine laser interactions, particularly during the plasma expansion.
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