The results of a joint international efforts of LOA* and ELI Beamlines in the field of seeded soft X-ray lasers led by Stéphane Sebban was recently published in a scientific paper entitled Demonstration of a Circularly Polarized Plasma-Based Soft-X-Ray Laser as the editor’s suggestion in highly impacted Physical Review Letters.
The team has reported the first experimental demonstration of a laser-driven circularly polarized soft-x-ray laser chain. They have used a circularly polarized beam of high-order harmonics to seed a krypton plasma amplifier in order to generate fully coherent light pulses at wavelength of 32.8 nm. The researchers have demonstrated that this approach amplifies the number of photons in the seed beam by nearly a factor of 10,000, delivering more than 10 billion photons in picosecond pulses while keeping the radiation coherent and circularly polarized. This source is thus suitable for photon-hungry applications such as imaging proteins and viruses. Sebban and his colleagues suggest that their compact architecture can be scaled to shorter wavelengths and shorter pulse durations.
“During our ongoing research in the field of laser driven short-wavelength sources of radiation we have proven that plasma amplifiers preserve polarization state of the seed. Our compact source of coherent circularly polarized XUV pulses can be for example employed for investigation of fast dynamics of magnetically induced dichroism in thin films used in the electronics industry,”said Jaroslav Nejdl a scientist from the ELI Beamlines team.
The complete article you can find here and the synopsis here.
The publication was also selected as one of the research highlights in recent issue of Nature Photonics.
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v9/n10/pdf/nphoton.2015.191.pdf
* Laboratoire d’Optique Apliquée (ENSTA-Paris Tech, CNRS, École Polytechnique), Palaiseau, France
