arXiv subjects

Michelle M. Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Michelle M. Wang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Focusing Terawatt-Scale Lasers Using Holographic Gaseous Lenses

The capabilities of the world's highest energy and peak-power pulsed lasers are limited by optical damage, and further advances in high-intensity laser science will require optics that are substantially more robust than existing components. We describe here the experimental demonstration of off-axis diffractive gaseous lenses capable of withstanding extreme laser fluence and immune to cumulative damage. We used less than 8 mJ of energy from interfering ultraviolet laser pulses to holographically write millimeter-scale diffractive gas lenses into an ozone, oxygen, and carbon-dioxide gas mixture. These lenses allowed us to focus, defocus, and collimate 532-nm, 210-mJ nanosecond laser pulses at fluences up to 35 J/cm$^2$ and 800-nm, 35-fs, 28-mJ femtosecond pulses at intensities up to 55 TW/cm$^2$, achieving greater than 80% diffraction efficiency. We also show that that beam pointing, divergence, and diffraction efficiency are stable while operating at 10 Hz. These diffractive lenses are simple holograms, and the principles demonstrated here extended to other types of optics suggests that gaseous optics could enable arbitrary, damage-resistant manipulation of intense light for next-generation ultra-high-power lasers.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Dispersive Properties of Plasma Diffraction Gratings: Towards Plasma-Based Laser Pulse Compression

The standard architecture for a high-peak-power femtosecond laser is chirped pulse amplification using diffraction gratings for compression; the damage threshold of the compression gratings limits current lasers to multi-petawatt peak power. Plasma gratings have orders-of-magnitude higher damage tolerance than conventional optics, so plasma gratings with sufficiently high optical quality could allow the construction of ultra-high-power femtosecond lasers. Here, we present experimental measurements of the angular dispersion, angular bandwidth, and diffraction angles of ionization-based plasma transmission gratings and show that both the dispersive and the diffractive properties of these gratings are in close agreement with optical theory and simulations. Gratings with a period of 10.2 microns are found to have an angular dispersion of approximately 0.005 degrees/nm. The dispersion and bandwidth of these gratings suggest plausible designs for a plasma-grating-based compressor and indicate a pathway to compact lasers with petawatt to exawatt peak power.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

Near-Unity-Efficiency Gas Gratings for Ultraviolet, Visible, and Infrared High-Power Lasers

Interfering deep ultraviolet (DUV) lasers can induce substantial density modulations in an ozone-doped gas flow via photochemical reactions, creating volume diffraction gratings. These transient optics are immune to target debris and shrapnel and feature orders-of-magnitude higher damage thresholds than conventional solid optics, providing a promising method for efficiently manipulating high-energy lasers. In this work, we describe gas gratings that can efficiently diffract probe beams across a variety of wavelengths and pulse durations, ranging from deep ultraviolet to near-infrared and from nanosecond to femtosecond, achieving a full beam diffraction efficiency up to 99% while preserving the focusability and wavefront quality. In addition, we present a comprehensive characterization of the performance of the gas gratings under various experimental conditions, including imprint fluence, gas composition, and grating geometries, showing significant enhancement of this process with the addition of carbon dioxide. We also demonstrate stable performance over hours of operation. Our results validate a previously developed theoretical model and suggest optimal parameters to efficiently scale gas gratings to high-energy applications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

High-energy transient gas pinholes via saturated absorption

This letter presents a spatial filter based on saturated absorption in gas as a replacement for the solid pinhole in a lens-pinhole-lens filtering system. We show that an ultraviolet laser pulse focused through ozone will have its spatial profile cleaned if its peak fluence rises above the ozone saturation fluence. Specifically, we demonstrate that a 5 ns 266 nm beam with 4.2 mJ of initial energy can be effectively cleaned by focusing through a 1.4% ozone-oxygen mixture, with about 76% of the main beam energy transmitted and 89% of the side lobe energy absorbed. This process can be adapted to other gases and laser wavelengths, providing alignment-insensitive and damage-resistant pinholes for high-repetition-rate high-energy lasers.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Greater than five-order-of-magnitude post-compression temporal contrast improvement with an ionization plasma grating

High-intensity lasers require suppression of prepulses and other non-ideal temporal structure to avoid target disruption before the arrival of the main pulse. To address this, we demonstrate that ionization gratings act as a controllable optical switch for high-power light with a temporal contrast improvement of at least $3\times10^5$ and a switching time less than 500 fs. We also show that a grating system can run for hours at 10 Hz without degradation. The contrast improvement from an ionization grating compares favorably to that achievable with plasma mirrors.

physics.optics↗