Modern chirped pulse amplification laser systems with continuously improving controllability and increasing power are about to reach intensities of up to $10^{22}~\text{W}~\text{cm}^{-2}$ and have proven their potential to accelerate ions out of plasma to several tens percent of the speed of light. For enabling application, one important step is to increase the repetition rate at which ion bunches are at the disposal. In particular, techniques used so far for thin foil target production can require several days of preparing reasonable amounts for a single campaign. In this paper we describe the reasonably droplet method which we have tested and improved so that the emerging foils with thicknesses of a few nanometres up to micrometre can be used as targets for laser ion acceleration. Their quality and performance can compete with so far employed techniques thereby enabling the production of hundreds of targets per day.

The development, the underlying technology and the current status of the fully diode-pumped solid-state laser system POLARIS is reviewed. Currently, the POLARIS system delivers 4 J energy, 144 fs long laser pulses with an ultra-high temporal contrast of $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}5\times 10^{12}$ for the ASE, which is achieved using a so-called double chirped-pulse amplification scheme and cross-polarized wave generation pulse cleaning. By tightly focusing, the peak intensity exceeds $3.5\times 10^{20}\ \mathrm{W\ cm}^{-2}$. These parameters predestine POLARIS as a scientific tool well suited for sophisticated experiments, as exemplified by presenting measurements of accelerated proton energies. Recently, an additional amplifier has been added to the laser chain. In the ramp-up phase, pulses from this amplifier are not yet compressed and have not yet reached the anticipated energy. Nevertheless, an output energy of $16.6\ \mathrm{J}$ has been achieved so far.