PetaWatt lasers overview

Dimitrios Papadopoulos

PetaWatt lasers are becoming more and more accessible all around the world opening up the way for impressive laser mater interaction experiments in unprecedented intensity levels. The scientific community requirements strongly and continuously push toward further peak power increase and focused intensities in the extreme range of >1023-1024 W/cm2 but also in the direction of more reliable machine-like operation of these systems. In this talk I present an overview of the PW class systems worldwide, discussing the basic technological choices in these systems, the obtained performances and the main challenges in their operation. A part of this presentation will be consecrated on the recent advances of Apollon, the french multi-PW laser system, being among the first users’ facilities in the world operating already on the PW level. In the last part I briefly discuss the perspectives of these systems in the near future.

Dimitrios N. Papadopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, on October 29, 1975. He received his diploma in electrical and computer engineering in 1998, the Master’s degree in physics, and the Ph.D. degree in laser physics in 2005 from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. Since 2013 he has been charged with the scientific responsibility of the complete Apollon laser system. His research interests include the generation of few cycle pulses, OPCPA techniques, high energy diode pumped systems, coherent beam combination techniques and high energy Ti:Sapphire laser systems.