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Most of the laser sources of ELI-ALPS are operating in the 100 W average power regime, while the peak power and the repetition rate range from 0.1 TW at 100 kHz up to PW at 10 Hz. The pulse duration lasts typically a few optical cycle, feeding six attosecond beamlines, two particle and two THz beamlines, as well as many end stations associated with the beamlines [1].
The first 100 kHz repetition rate lasers have been installed by end 2017, and became available for experiments from the beginning of 2018. The Mid-InfraRed laser (MIR) provides 150 µJ, 40 fs pulses at 3.1µm [2]. The first High-Repetition rate laser (HR1) has been operating in long pulse mode (1.5 mJ, 40 fs pulses at 1030 nm). The short pulse operation mode (1mJ, <7fs) will be completed by March 2019. The second High-repetition Rate laser (HR2) offering 5 mJ and sub-7 fs pulses, will be commissioned by mid 2019.
The kHz repetition rate SYLOS laser [3] has been completed its second development phase for providing >5 TW peak power pulses at sub-7 fs pulse duration. The system is available to run four beamlines from April 2019. In the meanwhile, parallel to its operation, the final upgrade stage will be developed, reaching an energy of >100 mJ by mid 2020. In order to serve the four beamlines efficiently, a so called SYLOS experimental alignment laser has been implemented. The laser “mimicking” the SYLOS laser at lower repetition rate, providing the similar beam size, peak intensity, and duration (3.8TW, 12 fs) at 10Hz repetition rate is available from end 2018.
The High Field Petawatt (HF PW) laser of ALPS has been designed to operate at 10 Hz repetition rate with a pulse duration shorter than 17 fs. The system is under installation, 10 Hz operation at 0.4PW level will be reached by mid 2019, while the full 10Hz operation will be demonstrated by Fall 2020. We also carry on experiments towards the elimination of bottlenecks of high repetition rate sub-10fs operation of the 100Hz branch of the HF laser.
The MIR and HR1 lasers have successfully served almost ten commissioning user experiments with external collaborators, investigating phenomena like electron migration in water, K-shell excited elections, etc., altogether for 51 operational weeks in 2018. Next year we expect to extend the commissioning experiments for the SYLOS laser as well as at least two attosecond and THz beamlines.
The challenge of the laser R&D to design and implement such lasers was taken by the industry (EKSPLA, Light Conversion (both Lithuania), Fastlite, Amplitude Technologies (both France), AFS GmbH (Germany)), academia, and ELI-ALPS, resulting in a change of paradigm in laser engineering, leading to novel state of the art research grade lasers just in a few years.
[1] S. Kuhn et al., Mol. Opt. Phys. 50 (2017) 132002
[2] R.Budrinas et al., Opt.Exp. 25 (2017) 5797
[3] N.Thiere et al., Opt.Exp. 26 (2018) 26907
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