In order to understand laser-matter interactions in the high energy density conditions that are present in ultra-intense laser systems, scientists gain experimental data by striking a variety of engineered targets and examining the resulting radiation, fields, and particles that are generated in the reaction. Data is obtained using a network of specialized diagnostic devices and data storage systems. Large data sets are required in order to build reliable models of the ultra-intense regime.
Scarlet Laser specifications:
400 TW System:
- 1021 W/cm2 intensity
- 400 TW peak power
- 800 nanometer wavelength
- 15 Joule per pulse
- 40 femtosecond pulse width
- 5 micron FWHM focal spot size
- 1 shot/minute repetition rate
- Greater than 1010:1 pulse contrast ratio
Laser Diagnostic devices:
- On-shot energy
- SPIDER Single Shot Pulse Width
- On-shot intensity spectrum
- Third-order Cross-Correlator for Pulse Contrast
- On-shot focal spot diagnostic
- Water-cell nanosecond pulse contrast
- Spatial mode cameras
- Spatial chirp diagnostic
Experimental Diagnostic devices:
- Electron/positron magnet based spectrometers
- Thomson parabola ion spectrometer
- Bremsstrahlung x-ray spectrometer (HXBS
- 68 eV XUV imager
- 256 eV XUV imager
- 394 eV XUV imager developed in collaboration with BNL
- Front and rear side HOPG x-ray spectrometer with flat crystals
- Curved HAPG spectrometer and imager
- Cu K-alpha imager based on spherically bent Bragg crystal
- Zr K-alpha imager based on spherically bent Bragg crystal
- Si He-alpha imager based on spherically bent Bragg crystal
- Radiochromic film pack (RCF)
- Single hit CCD spectrometer
- Cherenkov spectrometer
- Scintillator array
- Neutron detector (scintillator based)
- Image plate reader
Computational Capabilities (in-house):
- Six-node computer cluster with four 2.1 GHz AMD Opteron Processors per node (total of 48 cores/node) and 130 GB of RAM per node
- 10 TB RAID storage array