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A power fiber amplifier module consisting of two stage fiber amplifiers, whose fiber core diameters were 15 μm and 25 μm respectively, was presented. It can output 30 kW peak power with 300 μJ output energy, when the input pulsed signal is 10 ns in duration，1 Hz in repetition frequency, 0.3 nm in spectrum width, and 80 nJ in energy. The output pulse’s temporal characteristic was investigated. It is found that the output energy of the amplifier module is confined by stimulated Brillouin scattering（SBS）effect when the input pulse is narrow banded, and adopting the broadband pulse could improve the SBS threshold of the fiber amplifier．

Laser driven fusion requires a high-degree uniformity in laser energy deposition in order to achieve the high-density compression required for sustaining a thermonuclear burn. Nowadays, uniform irradiation of capsule is still a key issue in direct drive inertial confinement fusion. The direct drive approach is to drive the target with laser light, by irradiating it with a large number of overlapping laser beams. In the direct drive scheme, the laser deposition pattern on the target can be decomposed into a series of Legendre spherical harmonic modes. The high mode (shorter wavelength) nonuniformity can lead to Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which may result in the failure of target compression. This nonuniformity can be suppressed by thermal conduction and beam conditioning technologies, such as continuous phase plate, smoothing by spectral dispersion and polarization smoothing. The low mode (longer wavelength) nonuniformity is related to the number, orientation and power balance of laser beams, which is hard to suppress by thermal conduction and beam conditioning technologies. Generally, the nonuniformity of laser irradiation on a directly driven target should be less than 1% (root mean square, RMS), to meet the requirement for symmetric compression. Several methods have been proposed to optimize the irradiation configuration in direct drive laser fusion, such as truncated icosahedron with beams at the 20 faces and 12 vertices of an icosaherdron, dodecahedron-based irradiation configurations, self-organizing electrodynamic method, etc. However, limited by the different parameters of incident beams, the irradiation uniformity is often not satisfactory. Therefore, it is necessary to find new way to improve the irradiation uniformity and make it more robust. According to the analytical result, the irradiation nonuniformity can be decomposed into the single beam factor and the geometric factor. Simulation results show that the single beam factor is mainly determined by the parameters of the incident beams, including beam pattern, beam width and beam wavelength. By analyzing and simulating the single beam factor with different incident beam parameters, and comparing the single beam factor with the geometric factor, a matching relationship between them is found by using the optimized parameters. Based on the simulation results, a method to optimize the incident beam parameters is proposed, which is applied to the 32-beam and 48-beam irradiation configurations. The results show that there is a set of optimal incident beam parameters which can attain the highest irradiation uniformity for a given configuration. The feasibility to achieve more uniform irradiation by optimizing the incident beam parameters is proved. When the single beam factor is optimized in a directly driven inertial confinement fusion system, the restrictions on the beam pointing error and power imbalance between incident beams can be relaxed. The results provide an effective method of designing and optimizing the uniform irradiation system of direct drive laser facility.

The mode interference effect in LMA fiber was studied, the results showed that the effect can induce mode and spectral distortion, especially for phase modulated pulse, the temporal waveform can generate modulations on the top of the pulse.

The paper reports a high power, strictly single transverse mode ytterbium-doped large mode area fiber amplifier with backward pump scheme that produces near diffraction-limited, 2-ns shaped pulses with energies of 38µJ and peak powers in excess of 39kW at a repetition rate of 1Hz.

Time fiducial laser is an important timing marker for different diagnostic instruments in high energy density physics experiments. The probe laser in velocity interferometer system for any reflector (VISAR) is also vital for precise shock wave diagnosis in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research. Here, time fiducial laser and VISAR probe laser are generated from one source in SG-III laser facility. After generated from a 1064 nm DFB laser, the laser is modulated by an amplitude modulator driven by a 10 GS/s arbitrary waveform generator. Using time division multiplexing technology, the ten-pulse time fiducial laser and the 20 ns pulse width VISAR probe laser are split by a 12 multiplexer and then the time fiducial and VISAR pulses will be selected individually by acoustic-optic modulators. Using this technology, the cost for the system can be reduced. The technologies adopted in the system also include pulse polarization stabilization, high stable Nd: YAG amplification, high precision thermally controlled frequency conversion, fiber coupling, and energy transmission. The fiber laser system is connected to the Nd: YAG rod amplifier stage with polarizing (PZ) fibers to maintain the polarization state. The output laser of Nd: YAG amplification stage is coupled with different kinds of energy transfer fibers to propagate enough energy and maintain the pulse shape for the time fiducial and VISAR probe laser. The input and output fibers are all coupled to the rod amplifiers with high precision and being easy to plug and play for users. Since the time fiducial and imaging VISAR laser system is far from the front end room and located in the target area, the system also uses an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) to generate the shaped ten-pulse time fiducial laser and 20 ns VISAR laser. This AWG and the other three AWGs used for the main laser pulse of SG-III laser facility will be all synchronized by 10 GHz clock inputs, realizing the smaller than 7 ps (RMS) jitter between the main laser pulse, time fiducial laser and VISAR pulse. After amplification and frequency conversion, the time fiducial laser finally generates 12 beam 2 and 4-beam 3 laserbeams, providing important reference marks for different detectors in the ICF experiments and making it convenient for the analysis of multiple diagnostic data. The VISAR laser pulse is also amplified by the Nd: YAG amplifiers and frequency-converted to 532 nm green light by a thermally controlled LBO crystal, with output energy larger than 20 mJ. Finally, the 532 nm VISAR probe laser beam is coupled with a 1-mm core diameter fused silica optical fiber, and then propagates 30 meters to the imaging VISAR system. The VISAR probe laser has been used in many high energy density physics experiments. The shock wave loading and slowdown processes are measured. Function for measuring velocity history of shock wave front movement in different kinds of materials can be also added to the SG-III laser facility.

The cleaving and fusion splicing technology of the large-mode-area photonic crystal fiber was explored to achieve all-fiber structure. The amplification of the pulse with 1-10 kHz repetition rate, 10 ns duration and 0.3 nm line-width was experimentally researched. The suppression effect of the amplified spontaneous emission employing forward and backward pumping method was compared. Fundamental mode, 0.6 mJ pulse was obtained at 1 kHz which demonstrated the technical feasibility of achieving high energy and high quality pulse output from this kind of amplifier.

A new method of generating periodic linear chirped pulse is proposed, and a 0.52 nm bandwidth periodic chirped pulse is generated. Numerical simulation shows that the gain saturation, group velocity dispersion and synchronization jitter have great influences on chirped pulse; and self-phase modulation has little influence since the peak power stays at a low level. The experimental results indicate that the polarization mode dispersion will lead to a great intensity modulation, and the amplified spontaneous emission will break the light stability, which leads to the fewer round-trips of light. Research shows that the direct phase modulation is a novel method of generating periodic linear chirped pulse, which could be used for smoothing the spectral dispersion.

To improve laser irradiation uniformity, experimental research on smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD) and continuous phase plate (CPP) is carried out on the technical integration line (TIL). A bulk phase modulator with 9.2 GHz modulation frequency is adopted. The output spectrum of the phase modulator is stable and the residual amplitude modulation is quite small. The experimental results indicate that when the number of color cycles (Nc) is adopted to be 1, imposing of SSD in this divergence does not lead to pinhole closure in the spatial filters of the preamplifier and main amplifier. The contrast of the focal spot with 95% energy included with SSD and CPP drops to 0.47 compared with 1.71 without SSD and CPP. When the pulse width of the third harmonic wave is 1 ns and its energy is 1115 J, no damage is found in CPP and other final optics. The experiment solves some key techniques by using SSD and CPP on high-power laser facilities, and provides sound basis for the upcoming physics experiment.

Using comb laser pulses synchronized with the main pulse output by large laser facility as time fiducial to scale the reaction process between high power laser pulse and target is very important for the realization of precise measurement and simulation in the intense field experiment. We demonstrate a fiber multiharmonic time fiducial laser pulse generation system using optic-electric modulation and optical pulse stacking. A unit optical pulse with a width of 150 ps generated by modulation was stacked in a fiber stacker to form a 1053 nm comb pulse. The pulse was then amplified and frequency-converted to generate green (527 nm) and UV (351 nm) fiducials. The system can stably provide Shenguang-Ⅲ prototype facility with multi-frequency laser time fiducials which is essential for the precise physical experiment. In addition, the system is highly adaptive since it can generate fiducial signals with variable pulse intervals and amplitudes flexibly according to the requirements of different physical experiments.

The conversion of frequency modulation to amplitude modulation (FM-to-AM) effect is harmful to the high power laser facility based on the phase modulation technique. The FM-to-AM effect of phase modulation pulse induced by the weak etalon effect in wave plates was investigated theoretically and experimentally. A bulk phase modulator with a modulation frequency of 9.2GHz was employed. The numerical simulation results show that the FM-to-AM effect with a temporal modulation depth of 2.5% and 29.7% on the top of the pulse shape was induced by the weak etalon effect in half-wave plate with thickness of 1mm and residual reflectance ratio of 0.5% for 1 pass and 12 passes respectively. On the same condition, the temporal modulation depth is 3.0% and 23.4% respectively in the experiment. The results are in good agreement with numerical simulation results. To our knowledge, it is the first time to introduce the weak etalon effect in wave plates for a complex phase modulation laser system.

We demonstrate an all fiber multi-laser pulse generation system that can output broadband chirped pulse, nano-second shaped pulse and narrowband pump pulse for optical parametric chirped pulsed amplifiers system with precise synchronization. Yb3+-doped fiber mode-locked laser and single longitudinal oscillator are used as the optical source for the fiber system. The ultra-short pulse train generated from the mode locked fiber laser was split into two beam-lines and both were chirp-stretched to 0.9 ns. One of them was directly amplified to a magnitude of 10 μJ to provide the high-energy petawatt laser facility with seed pulse. The other was tailored by a 1.2 nm bandwidth filter to form a 140 ps unit pulse. It was then stacked in a fiber stacker and formed a 2.3 ns arbitrarily shaped pulse. The shaped pulse was amplified to 10 μJ to provide seed pulse for the pellet compression. Simultaneously, we sampled part of the ultra-short pulse train from the mode locked laser. The sampled pulse train was converted to electrical signal and phase-locked to generate trigger pulse that precisely synchronized with the mode locked pulse for an amplitude modulator. The continuous-wave laser generated from the fiber single longitudinal oscillator was tailed by the amplitude modulator and then amplified to provide seed pulse for the OPCPA system. The output of the fiber system can switch between different kinds of pulses with flexibility according to the physical experimental requirement.

Sinusoidal phase modulated pulse could provide broad bandwidth and high modulation frequency for spectral dispersion method in high power laser driver system. Phase modulation could be converted to intensity modulation due to dispersion during the pulse propagation in the fiber,and the intensity modulation enhances the nonlinear effect in the large-mode-area double-clad fiber amplifier and make the spectral controlling more difficult. 2 GHz and 1425 GHz phase modulation pulses propagated in fibers with different lengths were measured, and based on the dispersion model in the fiber, theoretical analysis shows good similarity between simulation and experimental results for the 2 GHz phase modulation pulse.

By time division multiplexing (TDM) technique, an all-solid-state all-fiber multibeam optical pulse generation system used for an inertial confinement fusion driver is developed. The continuous wave signal is provided by a single longitudinal mode oscillator. The TDM technique and he high speed electro-optic modulation technique are utilized to realize the train pulse and arbitrary pulse-shaping. The polarization independent acoustooptic modulation technique is adopted to independently output the multibeam. Eight sub-pulses which may be shaped arbitrarily are included in each train pulse, and the time delay between adjacent sub-pulses is 120 ns. A single pulse selection module is used so that each beam turns into an independent output beam and then each beam is amplified and transmitted to output. Finally, it is successfully verified that the train pulse can be produced by the TDM technique, and its sub-pulse can be shaped arbitrarily and independently. The each beam energy is 1.275 μJ.

We numerically simulated the dymamics of mode locking in pure positive dipersion lasers by NLS. Different from soliton lasers operating in net negative dispersion regime or dispersion mananged soliton and similariton lasers operationg in net positive dispersion regime with disperion compensation components, gain saturation and narrowing plays an important role in pulse formation in lasers composed of pure positive dispersion medium, in which the pulses evolve to gain-guided solitons. Stable gain-guided soliton was obtain in two kinds of mode locked fiber lasers operating in the positive dipersion regime, and experimental results confirmed the numerical simulation.