Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung mbH, Darmstadt, Germany

Access to the PHELIX 5kJ/PW Laser facility.

>>> GSI Homepage

Contact: Thomas Kühl Email

PHELIX is a Petawatt High Energy Laser for Heavy Ion EXperiments. GSI Darmstadt currently builds a 1 Kilojoule/1 Petawatt Nd:glass laser system, PHELIX. The project is a close cooperation with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US and the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France. The laser architecture of PHELIX is based on 31.5 cm diameter Nova and Phebus amplifiers. PHELIX will offer the world-wide unique combination of a high-current, high energy (GeV/u) heavy-ion beam with an intense laser beam. This will open the door to a variety of fundamental science issues in the field of atomic physics, nuclear physics and plasma physics

>>> access projects performed by GSI users

Activities:

In combination with the heavy-ion beams available at GSI – which deliver pulses of up to 1 kJ at a pulse length of around 100 ns– a large number of unique experiments will become possible by the high-power laser facility. Novel research opportunities are expected in a wide range of basic-research topics spanning from the study of ion-matter interaction, through challenging new experiments in atomic, nuclear, and astrophysics, into the field of relativistic plasma physics. Foreseeable topics in applied science are the development of new sources for highly charged ions and of x-ray lasers, new concepts for laser-based particle acceleration and the research in the field of inertial confinement fusion.

Research opportunities within the Laserlab access activity:

The PHELIX laser system has been designed to deliver pulses variable in length from 1 to 20 ns at an energy of up to 5 kJ (>10ns) and petawatt pulses with 0.5 ps duration. The basic structure is as follows:
• A versatile state-of-the-art front-end provides options for a variety of shaped pulses of width between 300 fs and 20 ns at 50 mJ output energy at a repetition rate of 10 Hz.
• A preamplifier produces pulse energies around 5-10 J. Special elements are inserted to shape the pulse to the desired profile.
• A one-kilojoule amplifier provides the high pulse energy. It is a two-pass structure with 31.5 cm disk amplifiers from the Nova and Phebus laser systems using geometrical separation of the passes.
• A single-pass booster amplifier with 31.5 cm disks can finally increase the output level for longer pulses from 1 kJ to a
multi-kilojoule energy of 4 – 5 kJ at 1054 nm wavelength.
• The system contains a stretcher-compressor set-up for chirped pulse amplification (CPA) delivering high-intensity pulses with an energy of about 500 J (optional 1 kJ) at a pulse length of 500 fs or less.
• A low energy (10J) pulse compressor and experimental space is available after the preamplifier with up to 25 TW pulses at higher repetition rates.
• High energy laser pulses and heavy ion pulses are synchronized and combined experiments are available at various locations as illustrated below.