Spatiotemporal Characteristic Investigation of Full-Aperture Grating Compressor for 100-PW Level Super-Intense Ultrafast Lasers

The size of compression gratings has become a crucial factor in achieving 100-PW level super-intense ultrafast lasers, in view of the laser-induced damage of grating compressor. To improve the output laser energy within the damage threshold of grating compressor and therefore obtain higher laser peak power, we proposed the full-aperture grating compressor (FAGC). In this work, the spatiotemporal characteristics of the output pulses from FAGC are investigated, based on the SULF-10 PW laser facility with ~400-mm beam diameter. The simulation and proof-of-principle experiment show that the pulse duration and the focusing quality of the output pulses from an FAGC are basically identical with those from a conventional 4-grating compressor; meanwhile, no evident diffractions are induced by the spectral clipping of FAGC. Thus, there is no marked influence of FAGC on the spatiotemporal characteristics of output compressed pulses. This work further demonstrates the feasibility of FAGC efficiently, which should be a promising scheme for realizing single-channel 100-PW level super-intense ultrafast lasers.