Design of a high-bandwidth probe laser for LPI and plasma photonics experiments

Pump-probe laser-plasma experiments have recently demonstrated that the refractive index of a laser-plasma system could be arbitrarily modified, enabling the design of plasma-based optical elements such as polarizers and Pockels cells. In this presentation, we will present a new design for a probe laser with high, tunable bandwidth, to be built at the optical science laboratory (OSL) laser at LLNL. The goal is to achieve single-shot probing of plasma photonics structures. Our design is a variation on smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD). In this study we are varying several key parameters (e.g. modulation frequency, modulation depth, color-cycling and angular dispersion) while keeping the bandwidth fixed, and look at the impact on laser-plasma interactions for single-shot probing of plasma photonics structures, and mitigation of LPI in ICF experiments.