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| TUP083 | The 10 Petawatt Upgrade Proposal For The Vulcan High-Power Laser | 272 |
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The Vulcan Nd:Glass Laser Facility* at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK has had a long history of providing high profile science with an International reputation in the field of plasma physics, predominately for a university based user community. Current capabilities of Vulcan include multiple infrared (1.053 micron) beamlines operating in the few hundred picoseconds to several nanoseconds regime with a total energy of up to 1.8kJ, synchronised with a single Petawatt class (1015W, 500J, 500fs) beamline capable of being focussed to an intensity of 1021W/cm2. It is proposed to significantly enhance Vulcan with the provision of an additional 10 Petawatt (300J in 30fs) beamline capable of generating intensities of 1023W/cm2 ' synchronous with the existing 1 PW system. This paper will provide an overview of and the challenges for the designs of the 6 year £25M upgrade project**, in terms of the laser, the high speed timing and synchronisation requirements as well as the computer control systems.
* http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/vulcan/laser.htm |
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| WEP015 | Grid-enabling the Astra Gemini Laser Data | 435 |
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Astra Gemini is a dual beam Ti:Sapphire laser capable of delivering up to 0.5 PW in each of its two beams*. The system can fire once every 20 seconds (producing over 1000 shots per day) and has over 200 diagnostic channels, including spectra, pulse length, traces, near and far-field images. This combination of multiple diagnostics and high shot rate leads to an unprecedented amount of performance and diagnostic data to save and analyse. To cope with this demand a system has been developed to automatically capture and analysis laser data on every shot, store it in an Oracle database and retrieve it on demand. A graphical user interface has been written to extract, sort and display the data in a tabular form. Powerful functions have been implemented to allow any parameters to be selected and plotted against one another to analyse performance trends and fluctuations. Metadata about each diagnostic can also be input to build a holistic picture of the laser system and help with future analysis. To increase the value it is planned to incorporate the target area experimental diagnostics into the system and make the data available to participating experimenters anywhere around the world.**
* http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/reports/2007-2008/pdfs/s7/ar07-08s7commisioningthesouthbeam.pdf |
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