A Petawatt Ti:Sapphire Chirped-Pulse Amplifier Chain Sized by Damage Fluence and B-Integral

This paper presents a computed design for a four-stage Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplifier chain delivering a compressed pulse at 800 nm. The sizing follows from applying the relevant intensity, thermal, nonlinear and geometric bounds at a single stated operating point, with every number produced by a deposited computation. The headline result is a compressed energy of 30 J in 25 fs, giving 1.20 PW of peak power, a final aperture of 9.2 cm at an operating fluence of 0.45 J/cm2, a whole-chain B-integral of 0.13 rad, and an f/3 focused intensity of 4.46e+21 W/cm2 corresponding to a normalised vector potential a0 of 45.4. The binding constraint is identified explicitly: parasitic lasing across the large final aperture and transverse amplified spontaneous emission. The design is SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED: no hardware was built for this study, and all performance figures are predictions from stated assumptions, offered as a basis for a build decision and a measurement plan.