Greater than Five-Order-of-Magnitude Postcompression Temporal Contrast Improvement with an Ionization Plasma Grating
High-intensity lasers require suppression of prepulses and other nonideal temporal structure to avoid target disruption before the arrival of the main pulse. To address this, we demonstrate that ionization gratings act as a controllable optical switch for high-power light with a temporal contrast improvement of at least 3×10^{5} and a switching time less than 500 fs. We also show that a grating system can run for hours at 10 Hz without degradation. The contrast improvement from an ionization grating compares favorably to that achievable with plasma mirrors.
Authors
- N. Lemos (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6781-5672)
- A. Giakas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2216-3604)
- Jesse Griff-McMahon (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0774-0613)
- J. M. Mikhailova (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1387-6285)
- P. Michel (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7584-7420)
- A. Morozov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5486-235X)
- N. M. Fasano (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1127-4712)
- M. M. Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1049-5413)
- Matthew R. Edwards (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9701-0736)
- Victor M. Perez-Ramirez (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1985-2582)
Institutions
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US)
- Princeton University (US)
- Stanford University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical Review Letters
- Published
- 2024-10-08
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.133.155101
- Citations
- 5
- Primary Topic
- Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 1.69
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- National Nuclear Security Administration
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory