Introduction
The Spanish Center for Pulsed Lasers is a scientific and technical unique infrastructure thanks to VEGA, the only laser system in Spain capable to reach one petawatt of peak power. A laser system with singular architecture, as it has three synchronized outputs of different powers that offer services to scientific users around the world.
The entire VEGA system is currently installed, operating and open to competitive access calls. At that moment, VEGA is already one of the ten most powerful lasers in the world and one of the three world Petawatt laser systems able to reach a high repetition rate (1 Hz). It has an innovative Petawatt system, as it is a double Chirped Pulsed Amplifications (CPA) system based on Titanium-Sapphire amplifier crystals. All of this to foster international research at the frontier of knowledge and to boost the Spanish Industry for laser technologies.
This versatility makes of VEGA a very promising tool for future industrial as well as scientific applications.
It must be recognized that the VEGA system is possible to reach intensities in the range of 1019 Wcm-2 which is much higher than the atomic unit of intensity (3.5 1016 Wcm-2). Accordingly, we are at the moment carrying out different experiments in the field of proton acceleration. The advantages of such powerful lasers do not only lie in the possibility of obtaining a tight focus and therefore an extremely high intensity; the possibility of obtaining large interaction areas, i.e., high fluxes rather than high brilliance, becomes nowadays mandatory for some laser-based applications.
(Click here to see the world map of Petawatt systems)
VEGA is a Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) system based on Titanium-Sapphire technology. From the very beginning, the CLPU has looked for a versatile identity that allows more users, more experiments and more technological, scientific and innovative development without loss of quality. The result is a unique architecture of this laser system as VEGA has three outputs (with different powers) synchronized by a unique front-end. That is why we talk about: VEGA-1 (20TW), VEGA-2 (200TW) and VEGA-3 (1 PW). Click here to see the VEGA laser system scheme.
Besides its high power, and the fact that VEGA can delivery very short pulses of around 25-30 femtoseconds at a very high repetition rate, the VEGA laser system of the CLPU has very high contrast, as you can see in the following table:
