25TW Ti:sapphire laser chain at PALS

We present an overview of the Ti:sapphire laser chain recently commissioned at the PALS laboratory. The laser is based on commercial laser units and of an in-house-designed-and-built compressor. The system provides peak power of 25 TW in <40-fs pulses and delivers up to 0.9 J on the target in the main beam, at a repetition rate of 10 Hz. The laser chain employs conventional CPA amplification technique consisting of oscillator, stretcher, regenerative amplifier, pulse picker, and multipass amplifier, followed by compressor. The compressor is designed to use residual zero diffraction orders to produce two additional 50-mJ beams. One of these beams is compressed by an additional small-size compressor. All three beams can be delayed with respect to each other in the range of about 0-20 ns. The beams are delivered by vacuum distribution system into a target room serving to development of sources of X-rays and accelerated particles. In the near future the system will be synchronized with the PALS kJ laser and will serve as an ultrafast diagnostic probe beam.