VEGA PW LASER | VEGA PW LASER

VEGA PW LASER | INTRODUCTION

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)