Development and applications of compact high-intensity lasers

The development of compact high-intensity lasers, made possible by the technique of chirped pulse amplification, is reviewed. This includes the complexities of high-power laser implementation, such as the generation of short pulses, pulse cleaning, wide-bandwidth amplification, temporal stretching and compression, and the requirements for high-average powers. Details of specific solid-state laser systems are given. Some applications of these lasers to short-pulse coherent short-wavelength [x-ray ultraviolet (XUV)] sources are also reviewed. This includes several nonlinear effects observed by focusing a subpicosecond laser into a gas; namely, an anomalous scaling of harmonic generation in atomic media, an upper limit on the conversion efficiency of relativistic harmonics in a plasma, and the observation of short-pulse self-focusing and multifoci formation. Finally, the effects of large ponderomotive pressures (100 Mbars) in short-pulse high-intensity laser-plasma interactions are discussed, with relevance both to recombination x-ray lasers and a novel method of igniting thermonuclear fusion.