CAREER: Plasma Optics for Compact Ultra-High-Power Lasers

About This Grant

High-power lasers that provide ultrashort pulses of intense light are a critical technology for fundamental science and a range of industrial, medical, and national security applications. The key constraint on laser power and performance is damage to glass and metal optics: to prevent high-power lasers from destroying themselves, their optics must be large. The size and expense of large optics make higher laser powers impractical and limit possible applications of existing systems. This project replaces optics inside high-power lasers with plasma components, allowing the control of a thousand times higher light intensity and leveraging machine learning to provide a unique, physics-based solution to a bottleneck in laser development. It also creates educational and research opportunities to train students in plasma physics and high-power laser engineering. The compact plasma-based high-power lasers developed here will both advance scientific fields like particle physics, plasma physics, quantum optics, and astrophysics and enable the use of high-intensity light for applications like nuclear fusion energy, radiotherapy for cancer treatment, x-ray imaging for sensitive material detection, and the construction of advanced accelerators and light sources for semiconductor manufacturing. This project takes advantage of recent progress in plasma optics to develop a plasma-based femtosecond laser beamline, tackling key issues in the physics of structured plasma in high-intensity light fields, the design of plasma-based chirped-pulse-amplification architectures, and the integration of plasmas into high-power laser beamlines. Theoretical, computational, and experimental study of plasma-optic integration will be combined with expanded educational and research opportunities for high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students in plasma physics and optics. Machine learning will be used to optimize high-repetition-rate laser experiments and large-scale plasma simulations, and the project will provide a generalizable platform for integrating machine-learning tools with high-power laser and plasma physics experiments. A detailed study of laser-plasma interactions under the conditions most useful for the construction of a plasma-based devices will be conducted to enable the construction of future systems. This work will produce a cohort of students and future scientists with a deep understanding of plasma physics and will lead to a small-scale prototype of a plasma-based experimental beamline that can serve as a testbed for compact, ultra-high-power, next-generation lasers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.