Contrast enhancements to petawatt lasers using short pulse optical parametric amplifiers and frequency doubling.

This paper describes the integration of a short pulse optical parametric amplifier into the chirped pulse amplification beam lines of the Orion laser facility. This enables Orion to generate petawatt laser pulses at 1054 nm with a nanosecond contrast of >10(10). By combining this with frequency-doubling post compression, we can generate 100 J, 500 fs laser pulses with a nanosecond contrast calculated to be ∼10(18).