0.5-PW 45-fs OPCPA laser system

This paper presents a 0.5-PW 45-fs laser system based on optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA). The 0.56 PW peak power has been achieved experimentally using an upgraded setup. The laser system is very compact, very stable, reliable and easy controllable. It takes a couple of hours for fine alignment and after that the laser generates half-petawatt peak power level pulses each 30 minutes during whole day. To the authors' knowledge, the presented laser is most powerful laser based on OPCPA and one of the five most powerful lasers all over the world.