High photon flux XUV and soft x-ray sources enabled by high harmonic generation of high power fiber lasers

Abstract

This contribution reports on the recent advances in high harmonic generation (HHG) with high power femtosecond fiber lasers at high repetition rates. The capabilities of high power fiber lasers, the challenges of phase matching in the tight-focusing regime and recent experimental results will be discussed. In particular, post compressed pules as short as 30 fs, with ~150 μJ pulse energy at 0.6 MHz repetition rate have been used for efficient HHG into the XUV. Despite the tight focusing phase matching is ensured by providing the target gas with adequately high density. A conversion efficiency in excess of 10-6 at ~30 eV has been achieved in xenon gas. This resulted in more than 100μW of average power (>1013 photons per second), which represents the highest photon flux achieved by any HHG source in this spectral region so far. In addition, further pulse compression yielded few-cycle pulses at high average power that have enabled efficient soft Xray generation in neon and helium. HHG in neon provided more than 3·109 photons/s within a 1% bandwidth at 120 eV and helium allowed for HHG up to the water window spectral region beyond 283 eV. These compact sources provide highest photon flux on a table-top and will enable exciting applications such as nanometer-resolution imaging or coincidence spectroscopy in the near future.