Self-compression of terawatt level picosecond 10 <i>μ</i>m laser pulses in NaCl

Abstract

We propose and numerically validate a self-compression regime of powerful 10 μm laser radiation (power 500 GW, energy 1.5 J, pulse duration 2.5 ps) in a NaCl crystal, taking into account its nonlinear and dispersive properties. We demonstrate numerically that the proposed scheme—a solid state compressor containing four NaCl plates (total thickness 19 cm) and divided by spatial filters—avoids the small-scale self-focusing process and reduces by an order of magnitude the initial pulse duration, from 2.5 ps up to 250 fs (seven periods of oscillation) and increases output power from 0.5 TW up to 2.2 TW.