Expanding Beam Laser Amplifier as a Basic Architecture for Scaling High Power Lasers.

摘要

In this report, the expanding beam laser (EBL) amplifier concept is presented as a method for efficient scaling of lasers to the multi-megawatt average power levels required for strategic applications. The main advantage of this concept is that it enables one to build power amplifiers having stage gains that are factors of 10-30 greater than the conventional approach. As a result a laser system requires fewer stages thus simplifying its architecture, reducing the laser cost and improving its reliability. For example this concept will enable SDIO to efficiently scale excimer lasers to average power levels which are a factor of three larger than that allowed by conventional amplifier approaches. This concept will also increase the stage gain in the final amplifier in a MOPA chain by a factor of 30. Such scaling will significantly decrease the fabrication cost of an excimer ground based laser (GBL) by a factor of three while simultaneously reducing laser system complexity and cost. For the remainder of this proposal the rare gas halide lasers will be used as an example to verify the advantages of the EBL architecture.