Abstract
One of the major bottlenecks still to be overcome in the pumping of large Ti: Sapphire crystals, in order to reach Petawatt - level laser amplification, is the careful control of the spatial energy distribution of 100 Joule-class SHG Nd: Glass pump lasers. Today, commercially available nanosecond Neodymium-based pump lasers exhibit poor spatial and temporal profile quality, which can lead to local hot spots, responsible for strong intensity modulations and irreversible damage to the expensive Ti: Sapphire crystal. The consequences of an uncontrolled profile of the pump beam are that the pump fluency in power amplifiers is kept low, just equal to the saturation fluency, and the resulting extraction efficiency of the multipass is low, with a persisting danger that a fluctuation will “kill” the amplifying crystal.
© 2007 IEEE
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