Beam distortion effects upon focusing an ultrashort petawatt laser pulse to greater than 1022 W/cm2
Beam distortion effects upon focusing an ultrashort petawatt laser pulse to greater than 1022 W/cm2
Tiwari, G.; Gaul, E.; Martinez, M.; Dyer, G.; Gordon, J.; Spinks, M.; Toncian, T.; Bowers, B.; Jiao, X.; Kupfer, R.; Lisi, L.; Mccary, E.; Roycroft, R.; Yandow, A.; Glenn, G. D.; Donovan, M.; Ditmire, T.; Hegelich, B. M.
Abstract
When an ultrashort laser pulse is tightly focused to a size approaching its central wavelength, the properties of the focused spot diverge from the diffraction-limited case. Here, we report on this change in behavior of a tightly focused petawatt-class laser beam by an f ㄍ1 off-axis parabolic mirror (OAPM). Considering the effects of residual aberration, the spatial profile of the near-field, and pointing error, we estimate the deviation in peak intensities of the focused spot from the ideal case. We verify that the estimated peak intensity values are within an acceptable error range of the measured values. With the added uncertainties in target alignment, we extend the estimation to infer on-target peak intensities of ≥1022 Wㄍcm2 for a target at the focal plane of this f ㄍ1 OAPM.
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Optics Letters 44(2019)11, 2764-2767
DOI: 10.1364/OL.44.002764
Cited 32 times in Scopus
Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-31186