The Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (Sulf) Project

We report the recent progress on the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF) project. The schematic design of SULF is described. The upgrade information from SULF laser prototype to SULF 10 PW laser user facility is presented in detail. Ahigh contrast front is developed to generate high-quality clean seed pulses which are then stretched to about 2 ns by a new double-grating Offner stretcher. A Dazzler is used to control the high-order phase distortions and shape the spectrum of the laser pulses simultaneously. The laser pulses are amplified to 7 J energy in the 1 Hz pre-amplifiers system before injected into the three stages large aperture main amplifiers system. The first two main amplifiers are pumped by five commercial lasers which can be operated at 1 shot/min. The final main amplifier is pumped by six home-built high energy frequency doubled Nd:glass lasers at a repetition rate of 1 shot/3 min. The final amplifier output energy is similar to 408 J with high stability under a pump energy of similar to 530 J. Compressed pulse duration of the amplified laser and the total transport efficiency for compression is measured to be 22.4 fs and 70.52% respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that SULF user facility has the capacity to deliver 10 PW peak power femtosecond pulses.