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.

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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.