Optical terminal analysis of a multigrating tiled compressor in a PW-class CPA-laser

In the highest-power chirped-pulse amplification lasers, the pulse must be stretched in time, amplified, compressed in a grating compressor and subsequently focused by off-axis parabola to obtain a high peak power. In the optical terminal, the temporal and spatial effects of mismatched multigrating tiled compressor on the far-field pulse are critical factors to be analysed. In this paper, a k-space raytracing model is proposed for the temporal and spatial analyses of possible errors in a four-grating single-pass tiled compressor. The results show that the last grating affects mainly the partial focal spot, while the middle two gratings affect the temporal waveform, and the partial focal spot needs much higher error control than that in the temporal domain in a picosecond pulse compression.