Ultrashort, Picosecond OPCPA FrontEnd for the New Vulcan TAP Beamline

High energy, ultrashort pulses are widely used for strong field physics experiments such as laboratory astrophysics [1], high energy density physics [2], schemes for particle acceleration [3], among others. Most of these experiments require ultrashort laser pulses with the PW peak power. One of the methods to generate those pulses is Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) [4,5]. The main advantages of the OPCPA are the high single pass gain, lower thermal effects as well as ability to support amplification of broad spectrum [6], which are crucial elements to generate intense pulses at higher repetition rate.