Achieving complex pulses with high-power lasers necessitates rigorous testing of specially designed optical components. The qualification of these components using complementary devices to access both the high-resolution and the large-aperture properties, followed by validation using propagation simulations, is proposed here. In particular, the topology of a large-aperture staircase-like Fresnel phase plate used to generate vortex pulses is qualified using a non-contact optical profiler and a large-aperture wavefront measurement setup based on a Shack–Hartmann sensor. The resulting topography is further used for simulating the focus of laser beams after passing through the phase plate. Step height distribution effects on the doughnut-shaped focus are identified, and avoiding the indicated pitfall in the design of the phase plate provides at least a 10-fold reduction of the irradiance modulation on the circumference of the focus in the super-Gaussian case.

We report on the generation and delivery of 10.2 PW peak power laser pulses, using the High Power Laser System at the Extreme Laser Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics facility. In this work we demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the compression and propagation of full energy, full aperture, laser pulses that reach a power level of more than 10 PW.