Gentec-EO calorimeters equip BELLA petawatt laser

Sept. 25, 2013

Quebec City, QC, Canada--Gentec-EO custom calorimeters were chosen to measure the high energies of the BELLA petawatt laser due to their high damage thresholds, high sensitivity, and outstanding signal-to-noise ratios.

Gail Overton

The BELLA petawatt laser at LBL is measured by Gentec-EO Calorimeters.

Quebec City, QC, Canada--Gentec-EO custom calorimeters were chosen to measure the high energies of the BELLA petawatt laser due to their high damage thresholds, high sensitivity, and outstanding signal-to-noise ratios. In July of 2012, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL; Berkeley, CA) acquired the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), developed and constructed by the French laser manufacturer Thales, which holds the world record for instant peak power.

The Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) is now able to produce ultrashort petawatt pulses of only 40 femtoseconds that exhibit a power of about 1.3 x 10¹⁵ watts at a repetition rate of 1 Hz. In addition of being unmatched in terms of instant power, BELLA's laser-driven plasma acceleration experimental facility is the only one that has the ability to use laser to accelerate an electron beam to energies as high as 10 GeV in an enclosure of about one meter long. Commonly, conventional particle accelerators are far less impressive in that perspective. For comparison, the Stanford linear accelerator in California can produce energies up to 50 GeV, but its facilities are 3.2 kilometers long.

There are now great expectations regarding this technology. Scientists on the project hope that people will come to BELLA instead of going to CERN or SLAC and wish that new avenues of radiopharmaceutical and patient therapy development will open up. Above all, they hope the project will pave the way for future accelerators to be more compact, more cost-effective and cleaner for the environment while still producing high-quality electron beams.

With more than forty years of experience, Gentec Electro-Optics has acquired extensive knowledge and developed great expertise regarding measurement and analysis of very high energy laser beams. Through cooperation with several leading research facilities around the world, the company has become an expert in terms of manufacturing, calibrating, and servicing calorimeters.

Using NIST traceable sources and proven calibration techniques, Gentec-EO says its calorimeters are always the most accurate large-aperture measurement devices on the market, with calibration uncertainties of ± 3% and repeatabilities better than ± 2% for very large beams.

SOURCE: Gentec-EO; https://www.gentec-eo.com/about-us/news/2013/petawatt-calorimeter#!/

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.