Operation of the ZEUS (Zetawatt Equivalent Ultrashort-pulse laser System) facility -- approaching 3 PW

The National Science Foundation-funded Zetawatt Equivalent Ultrashort-pulse laser System (ZEUS) is a facility that offers three target areas for the delivery of ultra-powerful laser pulses in a variety of configurations designed to support the discovery of physical processes in the relativistic and super-relativistic domains. Using the most recent beam data, this poster will show how the ZEUS laser is constructed and what its operating principles are. It will review how the 120 J of amplified energy around 800 nm can be split and focused to ~10¹⁸W/cm² to generate >2 GeV electron beams. At the same time, a portion of the light can be directed to a tight focus to be seen by those electrons as being in the quantum electrodynamic (QED) regime with equivalent power in the exawatt regime. Some provisions needed to maintain a 70% user time will be shown.