Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide

Danson, Colin N. and Haefner, Constantin and Bromage, Jake and Butcher, Thomas and Chanteloup, Jean-Christophe F. and Chowdhury, Enam A. and Galvanauskas, Almantas and Gizzi, Leonida A. and Hein, Joachim and Hillier, David I. and Hopps, Nicholas W. and Kato, Yoshiaki and Khazanov, Efim A. and Kodama, Ryosuke and Korn, Georg and Li, Ruxin and Li, Yutong and Limpert, Jens and Ma, Jingui and Nam, Chang Hee and Neely, David and Papadopoulos, Dimitrios and Penman, Rory R. and Qian, Liejia and Rocca, Jorge J. and Shaykin, Andrey A. and Siders, Craig W. and Spindloe, Christopher and Szatmári, Sándor and Trines, Raoul M. G. M. and Zhu, Jianqiang and Zhu, Ping and Zuegel, Jonathan D. (2019) Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide. High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 7. e54. ISSN 2052-3289 (https://doi.org/10.1017/hpl.2019.36)

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Abstract

In the 2015 review paper 'Petawatt Class Lasers Worldwide' a comprehensive overview of the current status of high-power facilities of }200∼\text{TW}$]]> was presented. This was largely based on facility specifications, with some description of their uses, for instance in fundamental ultra-high-intensity interactions, secondary source generation, and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). With the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Professors Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou for the development of the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which made these lasers possible, we celebrate by providing a comprehensive update of the current status of ultra-high-power lasers and demonstrate how the technology has developed. We are now in the era of multi-petawatt facilities coming online, with 100 PW lasers being proposed and even under construction. In addition to this there is a pull towards development of industrial and multi-disciplinary applications, which demands much higher repetition rates, delivering high-average powers with higher efficiencies and the use of alternative wavelengths: mid-IR facilities. So apart from a comprehensive update of the current global status, we want to look at what technologies are to be deployed to get to these new regimes, and some of the critical issues facing their development.