In 2019 we published the extensive review paper ‘Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide’ in High Power Laser Science and Engineering. We are delighted that the review has achieved over 1000 citations on Google Scholar and over 750 on Web of Science. We take this opportunity to reflect on the current state of the field.

An exawatt-class peak-power laser architecture, based on a single, large-aperture Nd:mixed-glass amplifier combined with a technique called chirped pulse juxtaposed with beam amplification (CPJBA) is proposed to significantly extend laser capabilities beyond the present 10 PW state-of-the-art for ultra-high-intensity lasers. CPJBA utilizes a space–time coupled chirped-beam pulse to enhance the temporal compression of a fixed-aperture grating pair in a novel six-grating compressor arrangement. With this, an appropriately structured, 20-ns stretched pulse can be compressed to a transform limit of 100 fs using a maximum grating aperture of 2 m. This enables the extraction of 25 kJ of energy from a single, large-aperture Nd:glass beamline while staying below the B-integral threshold. This paper presents the numerical modeling of the various novel sub-systems required for this exawatt-class laser architecture. In particular, the unique spatial and temporal pulse distortions present during amplification using CPJBA, and the strategies used to mitigate them, are discussed.