Technology development for single-cycle exawatt lasers

Considering the development of ultra-intense lasers in the post-10/100-Petawatt era, several technological developments have been proposed. The wide-angle non-collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (WNOPCPA) is proposed to realize near-octave ultra-broadband high-energy amplification for achieving single-cycle Exawatt-class lasers, and the first experimental demonstration is introduced here. Key optics like near-octave ultra-broadband gratings for pulse stretching/compression and one-octave ultra-broadband mirrors for beam propagation have been successfully developed for WNOPCPA lasers. A two-step focusing method with the combination of a parabola and a hyperbola is proposed to focus almost all the energy of a single-cycle Exawatt-class laser into a single-wavelength-sized focal spot. In this case, the Exawatt-class lambda^3 (i.e., all the energy in a spatiotemporal focal cube edged by the laser center wavelength) laser with a 10^26 W/cm^2 focused intensity is viable in the future as technology improves.