100 kHz water window soft X-ray high-order harmonic generation through pulse self-compression in an antiresonant hollow-core fiber

Abstract

Coherent soft X-ray (SXR) sources that provide a high photon flux in the water window are essential tools for advanced spectroscopy (e.g. of magnetic materials [1] and organic compounds [2] ) or for lens-less bio imaging with nm-scale resolution [3] . To date, such sources are mostly large-scale facilities like synchrotrons or free electron lasers. A promising alternative are laser-driven sources, based on high harmonic generation (HHG) in noble gases. Current state-of-the-art SXR HHG uses frequency converted Ti:Sa lasers (to ~2 µm wavelength to increase the phase matching cutoff) with multi-mJ pulse energies at 1 kHz repetition rate [1] . Most recently, there has been a strong push towards increasing the repetition rate of the driving lasers, and the SXR HHG, to enable faster data acquisition, space-charge-reduced SXR photoelectron spectroscopy or coincidence detection [4] , [5] . In this contribution, we present an approach to SXR HHG that is based on nonlinear pulse self-compression and HHG in the same helium gas-filled antiresonant hollow-core fiber (ARHCF). Because of the intensity enhancement resulting from temporal pulse self-compression, the experiments can be driven by moderate-energy, multi-cycle laser pulses, which facilitates repetition rate scaling. We coupled 100 fs-, 250 µJ-pulses centered around 1.9 µm wavelength at a 98 kHz repetition rate to the ARHCF ( Fig. 1a ). When the fiber length (~1.2 m) and the gas pressure at its output (~3.8 bar) were chosen appropriately, the pulses close to its end ( Fig. 1b ) were self-compressed to <20 fs, leading to an on-axis peak intensity >4×10 14 W/cm 2 . At this point, the gas is partially ionized, and the chosen pressure ensures phase matching between the driving laser and the generated SXR light ( Fig. 1b ). It is the first time that this approach is experimentally realized, and we have generated a photon flux >10 6 Ph/s/eV at the carbon K-edge ( Fig. 1c ). To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest photon flux at 300 eV reported to date at a laser repetition rate >1 kHz.