FY07 LDRD Final Report Precision, Split Beam, Chirped-Pulse, Seed Laser Technology

The goal of this LDRD ER was to develop a robust and reliable technology to seed high-energy laser systems with chirped pulses that can be amplified to kilo-Joule energies and recompressed to sub-picosecond pulse widths creating extremely high peak powers suitable for petawatt class physics experiments. This LDRD project focused on the development of optical fiber laser technologies compatible with the current long pulse National Ignition Facility (NIF) seed laser. New technologies developed under this project include, high stability mode-locked fiber lasers, fiber based techniques for reduction of compressed pulse pedestals and prepulses, new compact stretchers based on chirped fiber Bragg gratings (CFBGs), new techniques for manipulation of chirped pulses prior to amplification and new high-energy fiber amplifiers. This project was highly successful and met virtually all of its goals. The National Ignition Campaign has found the results of this work to be very helpful. The LDRD developed system is being employed in experiments to engineer the Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) front end and the fully engineered version of the ARC Front End will employ much of the technology and techniques developed here.