Laser Infrastructure: PHIN Drive Beam

The goal of the CLIC drive laser research is to investigate the generation of powerful UV light (by means of fourth harmonic generation of a 500 MHz Nd:YLF laser) that is proposed for PHIN, the drive electron beam project of the CLIC photoinjector facility. The current work involves the study of the quality of the 2nd and 4th harmonic generation of long pulse trains (up to 140 µs) at 500 MHz repetition rate in order to fulfill the CLIC project requirements which are summarized as below:

Table 1: CLIC drive beam requirements

Parameter

CLICRequirement

Trainduration

140µs

Repetitionrate

500MHz

Pulseduration

8-10ps

Trainrepetitionrate

50Hz

UVpulseenergy

2µJ/pulse

UVtrainaveragepower

1kW

SHpulseenergy

5.7µJ/pulse

SHtrainaveragepower

2.8kW

IRpulseenergy

13µJ/pulse

IEtrainaveragepower

6kW

 

 The laser system's schematic is shown in Fig. 1. A continuous train of pulses with a duration of 8.4 ps centered at 1047 nm at a repetition rate of 500 MHz is utilized as seed. The front-end laser is a Genki-10 XP burst, which contains locking electronics to the RF signal at CLEAR, fiber oscillator, and amplifier (Lydya). The main parameters of the front-end laser system are shown in Table 2.

PHINlaserschematic
Figure 1: A schematic of the PHIN laser system

 

Table 2: Performance parameters of the front-end laser system.

Parameter Value
Repetition rate 500 MHz
Burst repetition rate 0-50 Hz
Burst duration 0-1.1 ms
Pulse duration 8.4 ps
Avg. power in a burst 124.6 W
Max. CW output power 12.05 W
Center wavelength 1047.044 nm
Bandwidth @ 10 W CW 0.219 nm
Center wavelength @ 100 W burst 1046.575 nm
Bandwidth @ 100 W burst 0.488 nm
M2 at 10 W CW 1.05-1.08
M2 at 100 W burst 1.09-1.14
PER @ 10 W CW or 100 W burst 24.2-25 dB