Bright Coherent Ultrahigh Harmonics in the keV X-ray Regime from Mid-Infrared Femtosecond Lasers

By T. Popmintchev, Ming-Chang Chen, D. Popmintchev, P. Arpin, S. Brown, S. Alisauskas, G. Andriukaitis, T. Balciunas, O. Mücke, Audrius Pugzlys and 10 more. Science, 2012

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From Long to Short When you play a string instrument, you raise the frequency, or pitch, of the note by shortening the vibrating portion of the string: Drop the length in half, and you hear a harmonic at double the frequency. It is possible to do essentially the same thing with light waves by using selective excitation and relaxation processes of the electrons in crystals or high-pressure gases through which the beam of light is directed to produce light harmonics. Over the past decade, researchers have been optimizing the conversion of red light to the far edge of the ultraviolet, which corresponds to tens of harmonics. Popmintchev et al. (p. 1287) now show that mid-infrared light can undergo a process in high-pressure gas to generate ultrahigh harmonics up to orders greater than 5000 in the x-ray regime. An electron excitation process in a high-pressure gas converts infrared light into a well-confined beam of x-rays. High-harmonic generation (HHG) traditionally combines ~100 near-infrared laser photons to generate bright, phase-matched, extreme ultraviolet beams when the emission from many atoms adds constructively. Here, we show that by guiding a mid-infrared femtosecond laser in a high-pressure gas, ultrahigh harmonics can be generated, up to orders greater than 5000, that emerge as a bright supercontinuum that spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum from the ultraviolet to more than 1.6 kilo–electron volts, allowing, in principle, the generation of pulses as short as 2.5 attoseconds. The multiatmosphere gas pressures required for bright, phase-matched emission also support laser beam self-confinement, further enhancing the x-ray yield. Finally, the x-ray beam exhibits high spatial coherence, even though at high gas density the recolliding electrons responsible for HHG encounter other atoms during the emission process.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0fbe687e5c4f9a65cf3a1177e1415359ad1b27a

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Citations in the corpus

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Phase Retrieval with Application to Optical Imaging: A contemporary overview (2015, background): “The fundamental limits on the coherent X-ray flux possible with current methods (such as synchrotrons, XFELs [55], [56], and the process of high harmonics generation [144]) are not even known.”
Tabletop nanometer extreme ultraviolet imaging in an extended reflection mode using coherent Fresnel ptychography (2013, methodology): “Finally, because we use a tabletop high harmonic generation (HHG) 30 nm source [14], in the future it will be possible to image energy, charge and spin transport with nm spatial and fs temporal resolution on nanostructured surfaces or buried interfaces, which is a grand challenge in nanoscience and ”
Design criteria for ultrafast optical parametric amplifiers (2016, background): “In high-field processes such as high harmonic generation [9] the wavelength tunability of the driver pulses is important, since it influences both the energy cutoff of the XUV pulses and the phasematching conditions of the process [10].”
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