Vulcan front end
The Front End of the Vulcan laser facility contains the short and long pulse seed lasers. These laser systems produce the initial pulse that is then amplified in the Vulcan amplifier chain. With two different target areas each with different specifications, there are a number of lasers in the Vulcan Front End.
The short pulse lasers produce a train of pulses typically 200 fs in duration, with nano Joules of energy and a wavelength centered at 1053 nm. Only one of these pulses will be selected and injected for amplification into Vulcan. Before the pulses from these laser sources can be amplified in Vulcan to high energies they need to be stretched in time - typically to nanoseconds. This reduces the intensity of the pulses as they are being amplified and prevents non-linear processes causing the pulses to break up. After amplification the pulses are then compressed in the target areas to short pulse duration. This technique is called Chirped Pulse Amplification.
For the case of the Petawatt beam line the short pulse is stretched and then amplified to a few milli Joules of energy in the OPCPA preamplifier in the Front End room, prior to its injection into the rod and disc amplifier chain.
In this section:
