Femtosecond Laser Technologies for EUV and X-ray sources

Dr. Franz X. Kärtner

MIT

Over the last few years, advances in femtosecond lasers have opened up the possibility to construct fully coherent soft and hard x-ray sources that range from table-top size to kilometer long seeded FELs. The later facilities will be combined laser and accelerator laboratories. In this presentation, we discuss some of the laser technologies and physics central to such sources. First, a set of nonlinear optical techniques will be presented that enable long term stable timing distribution in large scale x-ray FELs with sub-10 fs and eventually sub-fs precision in the near future. Second, we discuss the scaling of seed radiation in the EUV and XUV generated via high harmonic generation. We have derived closed form analytical expressions for the achievable high harmonic conversion efficiencies both for the plateau region and the cutoff region as a function of laser and material parameters. Such sources can be stand alone or used for seeding of FELs. Third we discuss our progress in the development of large average power few-cycle optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers in the 800 nm to 2 micron range for driving the harmonic generation process. First results on a 2 micron drive laser system and power scaling with cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG will be discussed.

Friday, November 20th at 4:00 pm

Room 125, Dane Smith Hall