The Nexawatt: A Strategy for Exawatt Peak Power Lasers Based on NIF and NIF-like Beam Lines

An exawatt-scale, short-pulse amplification architecture based upon a novel pulse compressor arrangement and amplification of long-duration chirped beam pulses is described. This architecture is capable of extracting the full, stored energy of a NIF or NIF-like beam line and in doing so produce from one beam line a near-diffraction-limited, laser pulse whose peak power would exceed 0.2 EW. The architecture is well suited to either low-f-number focusing or to multi-beam, dipole focusing concepts that in principle enable focused intensities in the range of 10²⁶ W/cm² or 5 orders of magnitude beyond that possible from present PW systems based on chirped pulse amplification. (paper)