Abstract
The invention of optical lasers led to a revolution in the field of optics and to the creation of such fields of research as quantum optics. The reason was their unique statistical and coherence properties. The emerging, short-wavelength free-electron lasers (FELs) are sources of very bright coherent extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray radiation with pulse durations on the order of femtoseconds, and are presently considered to be laser sources at these energies. FELs are highly spatially coherent to the first-order but in spite of their name, behave statistically as chaotic sources. Here, we demonstrate experimentally, by combining Hanbury Brown and Twiss interferometry with spectral measurements that the seeded XUV FERMI FEL-2 source does indeed behave statistically as a laser. The results may be useful for quantum optics experiments and for the design and operation of next generation FEL sources.
Highlights
Glauber in his pioneering work[1] stated that a truly coherent source of radiation should be coherent in all orders of intensity correlation functions
The first steps have been taken towards exploiting the first-order coherence of FELs17,18, but to date, no consistent high-order statistical measurements have been performed at any seeded free-electron lasers (FELs)
We employ Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometry to explore the statistical properties of radiation from a FEL source
Summary
Glauber in his pioneering work[1] stated that a truly coherent source of radiation should be coherent in all orders of intensity correlation functions. We perform the higher-order intensity correlation measurements at FERMI and demonstrate that it statistically behaves as a laser source. The basic idea behind HBT interferometry[21,22] is to extract statistical properties of radiation from the normalised second-order intensity correlation function[23]
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