Synthetic aperture compression scheme for a multipetawatt high-energy laser.

High-energy petawatt lasers using the chirped-pulse amplification technique require meter-sized gratings to limit the beam fluence on the surface of the grating. An alternative, studied by many groups, is a mosaic grating consisting of smaller, coherently added gratings. We propose what we believe to be a new compression scheme consisting of beam phasing instead of grating mosaic phasing.