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We report on our high-contrast laser based on high-contrast, high-energy seed injection, low-gain optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA), and Nd:glass amplifiers, which can be used as the high-contrast front end of a high-power Nd:glass chirped pulse amplification (CPA) laser system. The energy of the stretched 1053 nm high-contrast seed pulse increases to 60 μJ by optimizing the frequency doubling crystal in the pulse cleaning device. After passing through a two-stage low-gain OPCPA, a 2-pass 2-rod Nd:glass amplifier, and a compressor the amplified pulse of 131 mJ/282 fs is achieved. The third-order correlation scanning measurement shows that the pulse contrast in the tens of ps range is about 10−7–10−8. With the high-contrast seed passing through the stretcher and compressor only, the contrast measurement indicates that the stretching-compressing process leads mainly to the contrast degradation of the amplified pulse.

K-shell X-ray emission from a Cu nanowire target irradiated by an ultraintense femtosecond laser pulse is studied using an elliptically bent quartz crystal and imaging plate. The designed bent crystal spectrometer has better spectral resolution, which is higher than 1 000. The absolute K radiation photon yields are obtained from the experimental results and the Monte-Carlo model. The conversion efficiency of the Cu K line is estimated to be 0.019% from the interaction of 4 J, 50-fs laser pulse irradiated on a Cu nanowire target. The high yield of K shell X-ray has important applications in X-ray emission source.

We report the recent improvement on the petawatt (PW) femtosecond Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplification (CPA) laser system at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences. By enlarging the sizes of the pump and signal beams in the large aperture Ti:sapphire amplifiers and optimizing the whole laser system, the output laser energy before the pulse compressor is upgraded to 42.6 J. Accordingly, the peak power of the laser system exceeds 1 PW. The shot-to-shot instability of the output laser energy at about 40 J is less than ?%.