Characteristics of high-energy non-collinear Brillouin amplifier based on fused silica

Abstract

Brillouin amplification is a crucial technique for overcoming power limitations in modern particle number inversion lasers, facilitating efficient laser power scaling. Non-collinear Brillouin amplifiers, operating in free space, offer superior adaptability and effectively address challenges such as pulse width matching, gain saturation, and limited beam count that are common in traditional collinear Brillouin amplifiers. This study utilized fused silica as the gain medium and conducted theoretical and experimental investigations into key factors affecting Brillouin amplification, such as interaction angle, energy, and polarization. The Stokes beam was amplified by a factor of 17.3, resulting in an extracted energy of up to 151 mJ and achieving an energy extraction efficiency of 41.5 %.