Engineering Doctorate (EngD) Development of the technologies and techniques required to increase the repetition rate of high energy lasers (RAL)

Project not available to non-EU applicants.

The EngD is an alternative to a traditional PhD aimed at students wanting a career in industry. Students spend about 75% of their time working directly with a company in addition to receiving advanced-level training from a broad portfolio of technical and business courses. On completion students are awarded the PhD-equivalent EngD.

High energy lasers are used to explore a wide range of scientific areas. At present the highest energy laser systems use Nd:Glass amplifiers pumped by flash-lamps, this is a relatively inefficient process that results in significant thermal loading in the amplifiers. This heat leads to deleterious thermal effects that act to aberrate the laser beam and degrade its focal spot quality. This reduction in focal spot quality results in an increase in the time between laser shots. This project will investigate the heating processes that occur within the amplifiers and develop technologies and techniques to mitigate them and thereby reduce the time between laser shots. This will involve developing thermal models of the amplifiers to understand the competing heating mechanisms. These models will then be used to develop novel cooling geometries to cool the amplifiers. To validate the results of the models the predicted aberrations will be compared to measurement of laser wave-fronts generated by passing through existing amplifiers. In addition the use and development of adaptive optics will be explored to correct for the aberrations. The adaptive optics and wave-front measurements will be combined to produce a feed-back loop to reduce the time between shots.

Project Partner: RAL