A strategy for developing the next generation of ultra-high-energy laser systems—capable of delivering one quintillion (1018) watts of power—was outlined by NIF & Photon Science Chief Technology Officer Chris Barty last mo nth at the tenth Ultrafast Optics co nference near Beijing, China.

In an invited talk titled, “Nexawatt: Strategies for Exawatt Pulse Generation with Modern High Energy Lasers,” Barty reviewed novel co ncepts that would leverage the existing NIF infrastructure to produce exawatt and beyond peak-power laser pulses. An exawatt is 1,000 times more energy than a petawatt, currently the highest energy level ultrafast laser systems are capable of producing.

Barty said the Nexawatt path to an exawatt laser involves the combination of a novel pulse-compression architecture, mixed-material preamplifiers, and a mixture of chirped-pulse and chirped-beam amplification. Chirped beam amplification is an LLNL-patented co ncept in which the pulse spectral co ntent is distributed in space, effectively producing a longer-duration pulse which may be amplified without damage in large-scale, NIF-like amplifiers. Unlike existing systems, the Nexawatt co ncept enables safe extraction of the full stored energy of the amplifier.

The Ultrafast Optics meeting had more than 200 attendees and spanned five days. The biennial meeting series is devoted to discussion and presentation of the latest research involving generation, amplification and measurement of ultrashort duration laser pulses. Barty, a member of the co nference advisory board, said LLNL has had a strong role in the evolution of the Ultrafast Optics conference. Barty, then at UC San Diego, co-chaired the first meeting in 1997 in Monterey, California, along with Bill White, then in LLNL’s Physics Directorate.