Alignment of solid targets under extreme tight focus conditions generated by an ellipsoidal plasma mirror

• Published in: Matter and radiation at extremes Vol. 4; no. 2; pp. 024402 - 024402-6
• Main Authors: Kumar, Deepak, Šmíd, Michal, Singh, Sushil, Soloviev, Alexander, Bohlin, Hannes, Burdonov, Konstantin, Fente, Gashaw, Kotov, Alexander, Lancia, Livia, Lédl, Vit, Makarov, Sergey, Morrissey, Michael, Perevalov, Sergey, Romanovsky, Denis, Pikuz, Sergey, Kodama, Ryousuke, Neely, David, McKenna, Paul, Laštovička, Tomáš, Starodubtsev, Mikhail, Weber, Stefan, Nakatsutsumi, Motoaki, Fuchs, Julien
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIP Publishing 01-03-2019; AIP Publishing LLC
• Subjects: Instrumentation and Detectors; Physics
• ISSN: 2468-2047; 2468-080X; 2468-080X
• DOI: 10.1063/1.5088166

The design of ellipsoidal plasma mirrors (EPMs) for the PEARL laser facility is presented. The EPMs achieve a magnification of 0.32 in focal spot size, and the corresponding increase in focused intensity is expected to be about 8. Designing and implementing such focusing optics for short-pulse (<100 fs) systems paves the way for their use in future high-power facilities, where they can be used to achieve intensities beyond 1023 W/cm2. A retro-imaging-based target alignment system is also described, which is used to align solid targets at the output of the ellispoidal mirrors (with a numerical aperture of 0.75 in this case).