Relativistic-intensity near-single-cycle light waveforms at kHz repetition rate

Marie Ouillé,Zhao Cheng,Aurélie Jullien,Peter Simon,Jean-Philippe Rousseau,Dominykas Gustas,Frederik Böhle,Stefan Haessler,Aline Vernier,Tamas Nagy,Andreas Blumenstein,Rodrigo Lopez-Martens,Jérôme Faure,Magali Lozano,Maïmouna Bocoum

doi:10.1038/s41377-020-0280-5

Abstract

The development of ultra-intense and ultra-short light sources is currently a subject of intense research driven by the discovery of novel phenomena in the realm of relativistic optics, such as the production of ultrafast energetic particle and radiation beams for applications. It has been a long-standing challenge to unite two hitherto distinct classes of light sources: those achieving relativistic intensity and those with pulse durations approaching a single light cycle. While the former class traditionally involves large-scale amplification chains, the latter class places high demand on the spatiotemporal control of the electromagnetic laser field. Here, we present a light source producing waveform-controlled 1.5-cycle pulses with a 719 nm central wavelength that can be focused to relativistic intensity at a 1 kHz repetition rate based on nonlinear post-compression in a long hollow-core fiber. The unique capabilities of this source allow us to observe the first experimental indications of light waveform effects in laser wakefield acceleration of relativistic energy electrons.

Highlights

Waveform-controlled few-cycle laser pulses are formidable optical tools that unite temporal finesse on the attosecond time scale with ultra-high electromagnetic field strengths
The temporal precision afforded by carrierenvelope phase (CEP) control of these pulses helped pave the way for attosecond science[1,2,3], which continues to Correspondence: Stefan Haessler or Tamas Nagy or Rodrigo Lopez-Martens 1Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 181 chemin de la Hunière et des Joncherettes, 91120 Palaiseau, France 2Ardop Engineering, Cité de la Photonique, 11 Avenue de la Canteranne, bât
Pulses from the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) are first only partially compressed to ≈200 fs in air to prevent nonlinear beam degradation in the entrance window of the vacuum beamline, which would significantly reduce the coupling efficiency into the HCF26

Summary

Introduction

Waveform-controlled few-cycle laser pulses are formidable optical tools that unite temporal finesse on the attosecond time scale with ultra-high electromagnetic field strengths. Broadband optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers (OPCPAs) have succeeded in scaling up the peak power of few-cycle pulses to the multi-TW range[12,13,14] Due to their need for large pump energies of several hundreds of mJ, these systems usually operate only at low repetition rates (10 Hz), which denies proper CEP stabilization. Because of their inherently high temporal contrast, OPCPA-based sources have recently enabled few-cycle-driven relativistic laser–plasma interactions at a 10-Hz repetition rate, demonstrating relativistic surface high-harmonic generation with sub-2cycle[13] and sub-3-cycle[10,14,15] pulses, as well as LWFA with 3-cycle pulses[16]

Methods

Results

Conclusion