Compact Laser Technology for Compton Scattering Sources

We describe compact laser technology for Mono-Energetic Gamma-Ray (MEGa-Ray) Compton scattering light source at LLNL. The high energy, 120W interaction laser utilizes chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in Nd:YAG to amplify a sub-nanometer bandwidth 20 $\mu $J pulses from a fiber system to 1J. A novel pulse stretcher provides a dispersion of over 7000ps/nm to expand a several picosecond wide seed pulse to 6ns. After amplification, the pulse is recompressed to 10ps with a hyper-dispersive pulse compressor. We also describe a technique for over an order of magnitude increase in the generated gamma-ray flux by recirculation of the interaction laser pulse. This technique, termed Recirculation Injection by Nonlinear Gating (RING), consists of frequency doubling the incident laser pulse inside a dichroic mirror cavity. The resonator mirrors transmit at 1$\omega $ and reflect at 2$\omega $. The 2$^{nd}$ harmonic of the incident pulse then becomes trapped inside the cavity. To date, we demonstrated 14 times cavity enhancement of 180mJ, 10ps, 532nm laser pulses.