Single cycle thin film compressor opening the door to Zeptosecond-Exawatt physics

By G. Mourou, S. Mironov, E. Khazanov, A. Sergeev. 2014

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article demonstrates a new compression scheme that has the potential to compress a high energy pulse as high as a few hundred Joules in a pulse as short as one optical cycle at 0.8 μm producing a true ultra-relativistic λ3 pulse. This pulse would have a focused intensity of 1024 W/cm2 or a0 of 1000. On interaction with a solid target, this pulse could form an efficient, 10%, relativistic mirror that could further compress the pulse to the atto-zeptosecond regime, with an upshifted wavelength of 1–10 keV. This technique could be a watershed enabling the compression of petawatt pulses into the exawatt and zeptosecond regime possible.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7901733a2f075773aa5c4245ea31a0c8b870742