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Trident laser



The Trident Laser is a sub-Petawatt class solid-state laser facility located at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL website), in Los Alamos, New Mexico, originally built in the early 1990s for Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research.

The Trident Laser Facility constists of three main laser chains of Neodymium glass amplifiers (or Nd:glass), two identical longpulse beam lines, and a third beamline that can be operated either in longpulse or in chirped pulse amplification (CPA) shortpulse mode1. The longpulse chains, beams A and B, are capable of delivering up to ~500 J at 1054 nm that are frequency doubled to 527 nm and up to ~200 J depending on pulse duration; the pulse duration can be varied from 100 ps to 1 µs. The third chain, beam C, can produce up to ~200 J at 1054 nm, or can be frequency doubled to 527 nm at ~100 J in the longpulse mode with the same pulse duration variability as beams A and B; or can use the recently (June 2007) completed Trident enhancement allowing the ~200 J to be compressed via CPA to ~600 fs and ~150 J, producing powers on the quarter Petawatt-level (~250 TW). The shortpulse system is capable of focusing the C beam down to tens of micrometres in diameter to reach ultrahigh intensities of ~1020 W/cm² or more. The laser is currently being used for ICF research, materials dynamics studies, and laser-matter interactions studies, including particle acceleration, x-ray backlighting and laser-plasma instabilities.

References

1 Trident as an Ultrahigh Irradiance Laser, R.P Johnson et. al, LA-UR-9541 (1995), Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Trident_laser". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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