Design Of High-Power Enhancement Cavities

This chapter deals with the design of high-power enhancement cavities for ultrashort pulses. In Sect. 3.1, design goals for high-power enhancement cavities are developed. Three example cavities are discussed in Sect. 3.2. They can be employed for applications such as high-harmonic generation or inverse-Compton scattering, whose specific requirements are discussed in Sect. 3.3. One important aspect for all these applications is robustness against perturbations. In Sect. 3.4, a metric for the misalignment sensitivity of enhancement cavities is introduced and investigated for the three cavity designs. The chapter closes with a discussion about the possibilities of astigmatic compensation in enhancement cavities in Sect. 3.5 with purely reflective optics.