Prospective laser characterization developments at the 2x10PW laser facility of ELI-NP

Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics research facility, in Romania, hosting HPLS, a dual arm laser system delivering up to 10 PW pulses on each arm at a repetition rate of 1 shot/min [1,2], will be introduced.

Laser driven experiments have three major components – laser, targetry and detectors. The talk will focus on the former: laser pulses qualification and tuning at ELI-NP.

• Preliminary results of post-compression of 1 J, 26 fs pulses to less than 12 fs and focused helical beams indicate a reliable laser system.
• Software routines for propagation of laser pulses with spatio-temporal couplings [3] and for helical ultrashort pulses [4] developed in-house agree with the measured results.
• Complementary, the temporal delay of the pulses on parallel arms was measured to be less than 25 fs at 100 TW output and was stabilized below 20 fs at 1 PW output of the laser.

ELI-NP thus provides to users a reliable testing ground for future experiments using complex or multiple pulses. The 100 TW@10 Hz and 1 PW@1 Hz outputs of the laser system are open for users since 2022. The 10 PW commissioning experiments running in April and May 2023 are paving the way for user access at 10 PW outputs in 2024.

Bibliography
[1] F. Lureau et al., High-energy hybrid femtosecond laser system demonstrating 2× 10 PW capability, High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 2020, 8, e43
[2] C. Radier et al., 10 PW peak power femtosecond laser pulses at ELI-NP, High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 2022, 10, e21
[3] A.-M. Talposi and D. Ursescu, Propagation of ultrashort laser fields with spatiotemporal couplings using Gabor’s Gaussian complex decomposition, JOSA A, 2022, 39(2), 267–278
[4] A.-M. Talposi, V. Iancu, and D. Ursescu, Influence of Spatio-Temporal Couplings on Focused Optical Vortices, Photonics, 2022, 9(6), 389