The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC
EU

Lasers

The ELI Beamlines facility is a high-energy, high repetition rate laser pillar of the ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure) project. The facility provides pulses from four laser systems. To meet the requirements for high repetition rates, three of these lasers employ the emerging technology of diode-pumped solid state lasers (DPSSL) for pumping broadband amplifiers. The fourth, the kilojoule laser, will use advanced flashlamp technology with actively cooled gain medium.

The amplification of short pulses in L1 and L2 systems is based on OPCPA (Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification). The L3 HAPLS system uses a titanium-doped sapphire amplifier. The L4 system utilizes OPCPA preamplifiers delivering multijoule source pulses that are further amplified to the kJ level in neodymium doped glass.

The L1 DPSSL pumping technology is based on the 1kHz Yb: YAG thin disk technology, allowing almost complete elimination of thermal effects on laser beam quality even at high laser output power.
Similarly, the L2 pumping laser utilizing Yb-doped YAG (yttrium aluminum grenade) as the active medium eliminates thermal effects by using a unique gas cooled system that maintains Yb-doped YAG at a stable temperature of 150 K (-123 ° C).
The L3 pumping laser is based on neodymium doped glass and operates at room temperature.

In summary, these laser systems provides multi-TW ultra-short laser pulses with high contrast at kHz repetition rate, PW laser pulses with a repetition rate of 10 Hz and kilojoule nanosecond laser pulses with compression capability to achieve 10 PW power. These systems enable the international user community to meet high-end laser resources for program research in the generation and application of high-intensity X-ray sources, particle acceleration, and in dense-plasma physics and high fields.

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