Characterization and control of high-intensity laser pulses for particle acceleration

• Applicant: Dr. Andreas Döpp
• Subject Area: Optics, Quantum Optics and Physics of Atoms, Molecules and Plasmas
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453619281

The invention of Chirped-Pulse Amplification has led to impressive developments in laser technology over the past decades and state-of-the-art laser systems such as the ATLAS-3000 laser at the Center for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Garching can deliver laser pulses of several petawatt peak power. An important application of these systems are novel high-gradient acceleration techniques, which promise very compact and bright radiation sources for scientific and societal use. But even though the performance of modern lasers is ever increasing, our capabilities to characterize the generated laser pulses remain much more limited. Most importantly, it is still very difficult to measure their spatio-temporal structure. Such measurements typically require scanning over thousands of shots, which is unfeasible for low-repetition-rate petawatt lasers. As a result, the spatio-temporal field of a single petawatt laser shot has never been measured and shot-to-shot fluctuations that are inherent to these lasers go undetected. Their affects on applications such as laser-driven acceleration remains therefore unknown.To remedy this, I propose the development of a new device for complete pulse characterization in a single shot. The proposed method takes advantage of recent developments in hyperspectral imaging technology to maximize the information content that can be simultaneously acquired. We will then use this device to measure, for the first time, the single-shot spatio-temporal field of a petawatt laser and correlate the results to the performance of electron and ion acceleration in CALA. Furthermore, recent studies suggest that so-called „exotic“ laser beams with controlled spatio-temporal couplings could drastically improve the performance of laser accelerators. We plan to study the spatio-temporal structure of such exotic beams in experiments and will investigate a method for dynamic spatio-temporal control of lasers.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups