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Generation of High-Contrast, Terawatt to Petawatt OPCPA Laser Pulses Generation of High-Contrast, Terawatt to Petawatt OPCPA Laser Pulses NICHOLASSTUART Department of Physics Quantum Optics and Laser Science Group Imperial College London Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Imperial College London and for the Diploma of Imperial College. September 2016 All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial. — Ernest Rutherford DECLARATION I hereby certify that the material of this thesis, which I now submit for the award of Doc- tor of Philosophy of Imperial College London, is entirely my own work unless otherwise cited or acknowledged within the body of the text. COPYRIGHT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non - Commercial No Derivatives licence. Researchers are free to copy, distribute or transmit the thesis on the condition that they attribute it, that they do not use it for commercial purposes and that they do not alter, transf orm or build upon it. For any reuse or redistribution, researchers must make clear to others the licence terms of this work NICHOLAS STUART Nicholas Stuart: Generation of High-Contrast, Terawatt to Petawatt OPCPA Laser Pulses, © September 2016 ABSTRACT Laser-matter experiments using >1018 W cm−2 focused light intensities from terawatt to petawatt peak-power laser systems are highly sensitive to the optical noise sources that are generated and amplified in conjunction with the primary high-power laser pulse. This limits the temporal intensity contrast, the signal to noise of the primary pulse intensity in time. This thesis presents a detailed investigation into the noise sources that degrade the contrast of high-power laser pulses created for laser-matter interaction experiments. To achieve this, a high-contrast multi-terawatt peak-power laser system, named Cerberus, has been developed to deliver up to 5 J, 500 fs pulses (10 TW) using an optical paramet- ric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) front-end and Nd:Glass laser rod power ampli- fiers. To compliment this study, >1010 dynamic range diagnostics have been developed that measure these noise sources in the presence of the intense primary pulse. Paramet- ric fluorescence noise from parametric amplifiers was measured with a diagnostic able to observe the real-time seeded OPCPA fluorescence noise emission and determined the fluorescence emission to be directly linked to the level of pump-depletion, with a ~500 times contrast enhancement from the undepleted to maximum pump depletion modes of operation. A combination of picosecond-pumped OPCPA and nanosecond-pumped OPCPA amplifiers effectively suppresses the longer timescale parametric fluorescence to >108-1010 contrast. A scanning third-order autocorrelator diagnostic (TOAD) was developed to charac- terise the compressed pulses emitted from a range of mode-locked laser oscillator sources and the compressed high-power laser pulses from major laser laboratories in the UK. We found the commonly used chirped pulse amplification architecture limits the temporal contrast from formation of an incoherent noise pedestal that can extend many hundred of picoseconds before the arrival of the primary laser pulse. We also observed non-linear generation of pre-pulses from internal reflections inside parallel-faced OPCPA crystals incident with long duration pump pulses. iii CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Optically Driven Ionisation Mechanisms . 1 1.1.1 Requirement for High-Contrast High-Power Laser Pulses . 3 1.2 Laser Amplification Methods . 4 1.2.1 Gain-Storage Laser Amplification . 6 1.2.2 Chirped Pulse Amplification . 7 1.2.3 Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification . 13 1.3 Organisation of Thesis . 16 1.4 Contributors, Publications and Other Outputs . 18 1.4.1 Outputs Related to Thesis Work . 20 2 IMPERIALCOLLEGECERBERUSMULTI - TERAWATTOPCPA / ND : GLASSLASER SYSTEM 26 2.1 Choice of Solid-State Gain-Storage Laser Media . 31 2.1.1 Ti:Sapphire . 32 2.1.2 Nd:Glass . 33 2.1.3 Nd:YLF . 33 2.2 Numerical Modelling of Optical Parametric Amplifiers . 34 2.2.1 Pump Depletion Effects . 38 2.3 Pulse Duration Measurements with a Single-Shot Autocorrelator . 42 2.4 Optical Damage Mechanisms . 44 2.4.1 Self-Focussing (B-Integral) . 46 2.5 Mode-locked Nd:Glass Master Oscillator . 47 2.5.1 Optical Stabilisation for Low-Drift OPCPA Synchronisation . 49 2.6 Picosecond Pumped OPAs . 51 2.6.1 OPA Pump Beamline . 51 2.6.2 Picosecond OPA Results . 56 2.7 Nanosecond Pumped OPAs . 61 2.7.1 OPA Pump Beamline . 63 iv CONTENTS v 2.7.2 Nanosecond OPA Results . 65 2.8 Nd:Glass Amplification and Compression . 67 2.9 Summary . 69 3 HIGH - DYNAMICRANGEDIAGNOSTICSFORCONTRASTCHARACTERISA - TION 70 3.1 Third-Order Autocorrelator Diagnostic (TOAD) . 70 3.2 Seeded OPA Fluorescence Diagnostic . 74 3.2.1 Experimental Setup . 78 3.2.2 Key Seeded OPA Fluorescence Results . 80 3.2.3 Analysis: Seeded OPA Fluorescence Contrast . 83 3.2.4 Analysis: Parametric Fluorescence Input Noise . 85 3.2.5 Analysis: Shot-to-Shot Fluorescence Intensity Statistics . 86 3.2.6 Conclusions . 87 4 CONTRASTCHARACTERISATIONOFOSCILLATORSTHATSEEDHIGH - POWERLASERS 89 4.1 Short Pulse Generation via Mode-locking . 92 4.1.1 Saturable Absorber Mode-Locking . 92 4.1.2 Kerr Lens Mode-Locking (KLM) . 95 4.1.3 Non-linear Polarisation Evolution (NPE) Yb-Fibre Laser . 99 4.1.4 Optical Parametric Oscillators (OPOs) . 102 4.2 Conclusions . 105 5 CONTRASTCHARACTERISATIONOFUKTERAWATTANDPETAWATTLASER SYSTEMS 106 5.1 Cerberus (IC) . 107 5.2 Orion (AWE) . 110 5.3 Vulcan (STFC) . 114 5.4 TARANIS (QUB) . 118 5.4.1 Contrast Enhancement from a Low Gain, Self-Pumped OPA . 120 5.5 Discussion: Non-linear Pre-Pulse Synthesis from Post-Pulses . 122 5.5.1 Improved Cerberus Nanosecond OPAs . 125 5.6 Discussion: Mid-Range CPA Pedestal . 128 5.6.1 Phase Conjugate OPCPA . 131 CONTENTS vi 5.7 Conclusions . 133 6 CERBERUSLASER - MATTERINTERACTIONEXPERIMENTS 135 6.1 High-Intensity Laser-Matter Interactions . 135 6.1.1 Free Electron Interaction in an Intense Electromagnetic Field . 135 6.1.2 Laser Propagation Through a Plasma . 136 6.1.3 Contrast Sensitive Plasma Heating Mechanisms . 138 6.1.4 Contrast Insensitive Plasma Heating Mechanisms . 140 6.2 Cerberus Short-Pulse: Optically Levitated Microdroplet Target . 140 6.2.1 Experimental Set Up . 142 6.2.2 Results . 146 6.2.3 Conclusions and Outlook . 148 6.3 Diagnosing MAGPIE Z-Pinch Interactions with Cerberus . 148 6.3.1 X-ray Backlighter . 151 6.3.2 Optical Polarimetry Probe of Magnetic Fields . 154 7 CONCLUSIONS 158 7.1 Future Work . 160 7.1.1 Removing Pre-pulse Artefacts with X-TOAD . 160 7.1.2 Scaling of OPCPA Contrast Studies to the Mid-IR . 164 7.1.3 High Energy OPCPA and Cerberus 100TW Design . 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY 172 LISTOFFIGURES Figure 1.1 Intensity thresholds for laser-matter interaction processes against the potential optical noise sources of a focused high-intensity laser pulse. 4 Figure 1.2 Mode-locking of seven discrete continuous wave frequencies to cre- ate a train of short pulses, with a peak-amplitude when all of these frequencies/modes constructively interfere. 5 Figure 1.3 Diagram of gain narrowing of a pulse from a non-uniform gain-spectrum. ......................................... 7 Figure 1.4 Simple cartoon of the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) method. 8 Figure 1.5 Electric field of a transform-limited 5 fs FWHM pulse stretched/chirped to 40fs by addition of f00= 72 fs2 second-order phase in 1.7. 9 Figure 1.6 Effect of third-order spectral phase on the temporal contrast of a laser pulse. 10 Figure 1.7 Layout of a simple two parallel grating optical setup that adds anom- alous dispersion. 11 Figure 1.8 Optical layout of a Martinez stretcher for producing positive GDD. 12 Figure 1.9 Schematic energy levels involved in SHG, OPA and a four-level LASER. 14 Figure 1.10 Operation of an optical parametric amplifier using a chirped seed pulse. An intense pump pulse (another laser) is temporally and spa- tially overlapped in the non-linear medium that is phase-matched to amplify the seed. 15 Figure 1.11 Parametric fluorescence from an OPA. This is emitted in a cone of angles, which represent the phase-matching angles and frequencies of the crystal to the pump. 16 Figure 2.1 Front-end of Cerberus laser system that produces the long-pulse Nd:YLF seed and short-pulse OPCPA seed for large-aperture Nd:Glass amp- lification. 26 Figure 2.2 Simplified component diagram of the Cerberus long-pulse and ter- awatt short-pulse beamlines in the Terawatt lab. 27 Figure 2.3 Laboratory layout of the Cerberus laser system and target areas. 30 vii List of Figures viii Figure 2.4 Excessive gain of the signal pulse in an OPA results in back conver- sion and intensity modulations at the peak of the signal to the pump. 38 Figure 2.5 Pump energy versus bandwidth gain in an OPCPA stage for Gaussian temporal profiles in the pump and seed, demonstrating the potential benefits to be gained from pump deletion of OPCPA stages, leading to increased bandwidth at the output as well as high gain. 39 Figure 2.6 Seed chirp optimisation of the amplified signal bandwidth (blue crosses and line) and energy (red circles and line) for a pair of OPAs operated at maximum pump-depletion and calculated using the OPA.FOR nu- merical model. 40 Figure 2.7 Example of over-saturation of the OPA signal produces a region of signal energy gain stability against fluctuations in the input pulse in- tensity. 41 Figure 2.8 Optical layout of a single-shot second-order autocorrelator.
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