Abstract
Extensive modeling of the seeding of plasma-based soft X-ray lasers is reported in this article. Seminal experiments on amplification in plasmas created from solids have been studied in detail and explained. Using a transient collisional excitation scheme, we show that a 18 µJ, 80 fs fully coherent pulse is achievable by using plasmas pumped by a compact 10 Hz laser. We demonstrate that direct seeding of plasmas created by nanosecond lasers is not efficient. Therefore, we propose and fully study the transposition to soft X-rays of the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) technique. Soft X-ray pulses with energy of 6 mJ and 200 fs duration are reachable by seeding plasmas pumped by compact 100 J, sub-ns, 1 shot/min lasers. These soft X-ray lasers would reach GW power, corresponding to an increase of 100 times as compared to the highest peak power achievable nowadays in the soft X-ray region (30 eV–1 keV). X-ray CPA is opening new horizon for soft x-ray ultra-intense sources.
Highlights
Over the last decade, ultra-intense X-ray sources have opened new avenues in physics, creating new states of matter, probing or imaging the most intimate components of living [1] or inert matter or realizing movies of samples excited by ultra-fast sources [2]
This work was followed in 2008 by the strong amplification, up to 600 times, of a high harmonic pulse in plasma created from solid target [11]
We consider as amplifier the plasma reported in a recent experiment on zinc soft X-ray laser (21.2 nm) since it exhibited the highest energy beam (12 mJ) reached to-date
Summary
Ultra-intense X-ray sources have opened new avenues in physics, creating new states of matter, probing or imaging the most intimate components of living [1] or inert matter or realizing movies of samples excited by ultra-fast sources [2]. We may cite the work of Wang and co-authors [5] that imaged using X-ray holography the local deformation of nano-domains of a magnetic multilayer after being heated up by a femtosecond laser This work was followed in 2008 by the strong amplification, up to 600 times, of a high harmonic pulse in plasma created from solid target [11]. Very successful, this experiment exhibited two unexpected results: the output energy of 0.1 μJ was lower or similar to those measured with gas amplifiers over our different experiments.
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