Available Equipment (ELI-ERIC)

The laser can be used to prealign SYLOS experiments or to drive experiments where low repetition rate is sufficient, like solid target experiments, or studies of laser induced damage threshold. The laser can be used for experiments with user-owned experimental setup. Laser diagnostics is included, for other detectors, diagnostics, please contact local personnel.

The SYLOS Experiment Alignment (SEA) lasers system initially was designed mainly for the alignment of beamlines and user experiments, but it is also capable of driving many experiments by itself.

Brief description of the available set up

The SYLOS Experiment Alignment laser provides more than 2 TW peak power pulses with less than 15 fs duration at 10 Hz repetition rate. The laser system engineered by EKSPLA Ltd. resembles parameters of the SYLOS laser [1].

Description of key areas of science

The purpose of the laser system is to assist the preparation of the experiments for the beamlines. However, it is also able to drive the the attosecond sources at the Sylos Compact and the Sylos Long beamlines as well as various particle sources, like the Low-Energy Ion Acceleration experiment for neutron generation and in the future laser driven wakefield electron acceleration (eSylos) and surface high harmonic generation beamlines (SHHG).

Full description of system:

It starts with a common oscillator feeding both the 80ps picosecond Nd:YAG pump laser and a sequence of NOPCPA stages consisting of BBO amplifier crystals(Figure 1).

Figure 1: Schematic layout of SYLOS Experiment Alignment

The most important output parameters are shown in Table 1. The energy can be slowly varied continuously from 10 mJ to 35 mJ while other parameters are kept constant. The pulse duration can be stretched up to 200 fs with additional negative chirp or alternatively by limiting the spectrum at the expense of pulse energy. All other parameters, including repetition rate and beam profile are not flexible.

 Table 1: Measured laser parameters at the output

The typical spectrum ranges from 750 nm to 960 nm, and subject to minor day-to-day variations (Fig.2 a), while the pulse duration is kept shorter than 12 fs. The beam profile is 57 mm diameter top-hat shape (Fig.2 b).

Figure 2: Typical spectrum (a) and near field beam profile (b)

Figure 3: Best-effort pulse duration, measured by chirp-scan.

Available metrology

• Pulse duration 

• Beam profiler

• Energy meter

• Temporal contrast

• CEP measurement

• Spectrum

References

[1] R. Budriūnas et al, Opt. Express 25 (2017).