Dispersion and Bandwidth Properties of Ionization Gratings for Pulse Compression

The limited damage threshold of solid-state optics requires high-power lasers to have such large components that increasing the peak power of ultrashort-pulse systems to the tens-to-hundreds-of-petawatts scale is prohibitively expensive. In particular, the final compression grating in a chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system is the main limitation when designing compact high-power lasers as it must be big enough to handle the full power of a pulse. Plasma gratings can provide a solution to this issue because their damage thresholds are orders-of-magnitude larger than solid-state gratings, enabling smaller plasma-based high-power optical devices. Ionization gratings can be created by crossing two laser beams within a gas, resulting in alternating layers of plasma and neutral gas if the intensity in the constructive interference fringes is high enough for ionization. We present experimental measurements and computational simulations that demonstrate the optical properties of ionization gratings including the angular dispersion and the spectral and angular bandwidth. The presented results indicate that ionization gratings could be reliable replacements for the final compression grating in a plasma-based CPA architecture.



This work was partially supported by NNSA Grant No. DE-NA0004130 and NSF Grants PHY-2308641, PHY-1806911, and PHY-2206711. Work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.