Operation of the all-diode pumped multi-terawatt-laser POLARIS

After years of investigations, the development of diode-laser pumped glass amplifiers for the POLARIS-laser system at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena reached the 10-J level of daily operation [1–4]. Pulses originating from a commercial fs-Titanium:Sapphire oscillator are amplified in the first stage A1, stretched to a ns-pulse duration in a 4-pass grating stretcher and further amplified in three consecutive stages A2 to A4. At the end of the chain they are re-compressed by a tiled grating compressor to a pulse duration of less than 170 fs (FWHM) [2]. In this presentation we summarize efforts made in recent years in order to provide a multi-terawatt laser output power.