Abstract
Secondary radiation sources emitting coherent bright ultrafast soft X-ray pulses are important for time- and frequency-resolved spectroscopy of materials and molecules and would enable numerous applications in bio- and nano-structure imaging. Increasing the photon flux in the water window and in the keV soft-X-ray spectral ranges produced via higher-order harmonic generation (HHG) in neutral noble gas targets has been subject of intense theoretical and experimental efforts for over a decade (see ref.[1] and references therein for a review.) An attractive feature of employing long-wavelength driver lasers is that for a given laser pulse intensity the single-atom cut-off energy of the HHG spectrum scales as λ~2, where λ is the wavelength of the driver pulse. Unfortunately, the HHG photon flux scales as λ~ −5.5 in this single-atom regime. However, high X-ray photon fluxes using long-wavelength driver sources can be obtained by phase-matching the HHG upconversion process, which compensates for the low single atom yield [1]. In this work we report on the design of an unprecedented few-cycle mid-IR parametric light source delivering nearly 0.1-TW peak power pulses and on the preliminary HHG tests that extend the fully phase-matched generation beyond 870 eV in a high-pressure Ne target.
© 2011 Optical Society of America
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