ARCTURUS laser: a versatile high-contrast, high-power multi-beam laser system

With the latest configuration, the Ti:Sa laser system ARCTURUS (Dusseldorf University, Germany) operates with a double-chirped pulse amplification (CPA) architecture delivering pulses with an energy of 7J before compression in each of the two high-power beams. By the implementation of a plasma mirror system, the intrinsic laser contrast is enhanced up to 10(-12) on a time scale of hundreds of picoseconds, before the main peak. The laser system has been used in various configurations for advanced experiments and different studies have been carried out employing the high-power laser beams as a single, high-intensity interaction beam (I approximate to 10(20) W/cm(2)), ), in dual- and multi-beam onfigurations or in a pump-probe arrangement.