High Power Laser Developments with Femtosecond to Nanosecond Pulse Durations for Laser Shock Science and Engineering

We describe three specific high power laser systems that are being developed in our laboratory for many applications in high field science, nonlinear optics and material processing. We report on a femtosecond petawatt-class Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification laser system that can produce a pulse energy of 20 J of 40 fs pulse duration, a picosecond high intensity Yb:YAG chirped-pulse amplification laser system that can generate a pulse energy of 100 mJ of 0.5 ps pulse duration, and a nanosecond high repetition rate Nd:YAG laser system that can provide an average power of 360 W with a pulse duration of 30 ns delivered at a 1 kHz repetition rate. We discuss the basic design aspects and present the results from our experimental investigations of these laser systems.