It’s official — the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has installed the highest peak power laser diode arrays in the world.
Altogether, the new system will represent a peak power of 3.2 megawatts.
These arrays are expected to be a key component of the Lab’s High-Repetition-Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS). Once construction is complete, the HAPLS laser system will move to the European Union’s Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines facility in the Czech Republic for research purposes.
“The Extreme Light Infrastructure in Europe is building international scientific user facilities equipped with cutting-edge laser technology to explore fundamental science and applications,” said HAPLS Program Director Constantin Haefner. “Livermore is one of the world leaders in high-energy, high-average-power laser systems, and ELI Beamlines in Prague has partnered with us to build HAPLS, a new-generation petawatt laser system, enabling new avenues of scientific research.”
This project comes with some impressive specs. HAPLS will be capable of generating peak powers greater than one petawatt (1 quadrillion watts) at a repetition rate of 10 Hertz; each pulse that fires off will last just 30 femtoseconds (30 quadrillionths of a second). This super high repetition rate will be a major improvement over the current petawatt system technologies which use flashlamps as the primary pump source; they fire off at a maximum of once per second.
With the diode arrays firing 10 times per second, kilojoule laser pulses will be delivered to the final power amplifier.
To achieve such futuristic technology, the designers behind the HAPLS needed to look past current laser pump technology, which uses the aforementioned intense flashes of white light from the flashlamps to “pump” laser-active atoms in large slabs of laser glass to a more “excited” energy state.
Specifically, the team focused on increasing the repetition rate beyond once per second, and so set out to create a system that transferred less heat than flashlamps and also remove it at a faster rate; creating this capability, they believed, would lessen the time between shots.
“Flashlamp technology for lasers has been around for more than 50 years, and we’ve pretty much pushed the limits of that technology and maxed out what we can do with them,” said Andy Bayramian, systems architect on HAPLS. “We’ve closed the books on flashlamps and started a new one with these laser diode arrays, enabling a far more advanced class of high-energy laser systems.”
LLNL partnered with Lasertel to develop the diode arrays. The company is best known for developing high-powered semiconductor laser pump modules. Their experts combined the company’s advanced semiconductor laser technology with novel micro-optics to supply megawatt-class pump modules in a reliable, integrated platform.
“We are thrilled to be working with LLNL, who continues to push the boundaries for high-energy laser systems. Our collaboration has enabled several new benchmarks for laser performance to be set in a remarkably short period of time,” Lasertel President Mark McElhinney said. “This is a validation of the significant progress that has been made toward the routine production of high-energy lasers for revolutionary commercial applications and groundbreaking scientific research.”
For their part, LLNL developed an entirely new type of pulsed-power system that could better drive these diode arrays. The system they ended up creating supplies the arrays with electrical power by drawing energy from the grid and then converting it to a high-current, precisely-shaped electrical pulse.
All told, each power supply is able to drive 40,000 amps.
It’s believed that these high-average-power, high-energy laser systems will drive research in a bevy of scientific areas and applications, including advanced imaging, particle acceleration, biophysics, chemistry, and quantum physics, as well as national security applications and industrial processes .
“Combining Lasertel’s diode technology with Livermore’s highly compact and efficient pulsed-power system is THE enabling technology to drive high energy lasers at rep rate,” Haefner said. “This combination of expertise has created a robust, stable, laser driver platform with high reliability, cost efficiency and – most important for the scientific user community – long-term scalability to maintain competitiveness in the future.”
As mentioned earlier, HAPLS is presently under construction. It is expected to be installed and integrated into the ELI Beamlines facility starting in 2017.
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