The ultrashort, ultrahigh intensity pulse laser has been fully developed in past three decades. Chirped amplification (CPA) system plays an important role the generation of laser. Pulse compression gratings (PCGs) are key element CPA and determine performance lifetime whole system. We introduce principle requirements PCGs. Then development status PCGs, including Au-coated grating, multilayer di...

Compressing high-power laser beams in plasmas via generation of a coherent cascade of electromagnetic sidebands is described. The technique requires two copropagating beams detuned by a near-resonant frequency Omega approximately < omega(p). The ponderomotive force of the laser beat wave drives an electron plasma wave which modifies the refractive index of plasma so as to produce a periodic pha...

In the past decade it was demonstrated experimentally that negatively-chirped laser pulses can lower the surface LIDT for wide band-gap materials by decreasing the number of photons required for photoionization on the leading edge of the pulse. Similarly, simulations have shown that positively-chirped pulses resulting from selffocusing and self-phase modulation in bulk dielectrics can alter the...

Autoresonance offers an efficient and robust means for the ponderomotive excitation of nonlinear Langmuir waves by phase-locking of the plasma wave to the slowly chirped beat frequency of the driving lasers via adiabatic passage through resonance. This mechanism is analyzed for the case of a cold, relativistic, underdense electron plasma, and its suitability for particle acceleration is discuss...

We demonstrate a cryogenically cooled Ti:sapphire ultrafast regenerative amplifier laser system producing >20 μJ energies at 50 kHz, >12 μJ at 200 kHz and >3.5 μJ at 1MHz with repetition rates continuously tunable from 50 kHz up to 1.7 MHz in a footprint of only 60x180 cm². This laser uses down-chirped pulse amplification employing a grism stretcher and a glass-block compressor, achieving sub-6...