An ultra-high gain and efficient amplifier based on Raman amplification in plasma
Raman amplification arising from the excitation of a density echelon in plasma could lead to amplifiers that significantly exceed current power limits of conventional laser media. Here we show that 1–100 J pump pulses can amplify picojoule seed pulses to nearly joule level. The extremely high gain a...
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Published in | Scientific reports Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 2399 - 10 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
Nature Publishing Group UK
25.05.2017
Nature Publishing Group Nature Portfolio |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Raman amplification arising from the excitation of a density echelon in plasma could lead to amplifiers that significantly exceed current power limits of conventional laser media. Here we show that 1–100 J pump pulses can amplify picojoule seed pulses to nearly joule level. The extremely high gain also leads to significant amplification of backscattered radiation from “noise”, arising from stochastic plasma fluctuations that competes with externally injected seed pulses, which are amplified to similar levels at the highest pump energies. The pump energy is scattered into the seed at an oblique angle with 14 J sr
−1
, and net gains of more than eight orders of magnitude. The maximum gain coefficient, of 180 cm
−1
, exceeds high-power solid-state amplifying media by orders of magnitude. The observation of a minimum of 640 J sr
−1
directly backscattered from noise, corresponding to ≈10% of the pump energy in the observation solid angle, implies potential overall efficiencies greater than 10%. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 AC52-07NA27344; EP/N028694/1; EP/I029206/1; H2020 EC-GA 654148; CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_008/0000162 LLNL-JRNL-729352 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) European Commission (EC) USDOE German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) German Research Foundation (DFG) |
ISSN: | 2045-2322 2045-2322 |
DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-017-01783-4 |