No Arabic abstract
A technique is proposed to generate attosecond pulse trains of radiation from a Free-Electron Laser amplifier. The optics-free technique synthesises a comb of longitudinal modes by applying a series of spatio-temporal shifts between the co-propagating radiation and electron bunch in the FEL. The modes may be phase-locked by modulating the electron beam energy at the mode spacing frequency. Three-dimensional simulations demonstrate the generation of a train of 400as pulses at giga-watt power levels evenly spaced by 2.5fs at a wavelength of 124 Angstrom. In the X-ray at wavelength 1.5 Angstrom, trains of 23as pulses evenly spaced by 150as and of peak power up to 6GW are predicted.
We present the experimental demonstration of a method for generating two spectrally and temporally separated pulses by an externally seeded, single-pass free-electron laser operating in the extreme-ultraviolet spectral range. Our results, collected on the FERMI@Elettra facility and confirmed by numerical simulations, demonstrate the possibility of controlling both the spectral and temporal features of the generated pulses. A free-electron laser operated in this mode becomes a suitable light source for jitter-free, two-colour pump-probe experiments.
We present what is to our knowledge the most complete 1-D numerical analysis of the evolution and the propagation dynamics of an ultrashort laser pulse in a Ti:Sapphire laser oscillator. This study confirms the dispersion managed model of mode-locking, and emphasizes the role of the Kerr nonlinearity in generating mode-locked spectra with a smooth and well-behaved spectral phase. A very good agreement with preliminary experimental measurements is found.
The quantum mechanical motion of electrons in molecules and solids occurs on the sub-femtosecond timescale. Consequently, the study of ultrafast electronic phenomena requires the generation of laser pulses shorter than 1 fs and of sufficient intensity to interact with their target with high probability. Probing these dynamics with atomic-site specificity requires the extension of sub-femtosecond pulses to the soft X-ray spectral region. Here we report the generation of isolated GW-scale soft X-ray attosecond pulses with an X-ray free-electron laser. Our source has a pulse energy that is six orders of magnitude larger than any other source of isolated attosecond pulses in the soft X-ray spectral region, with a peak power in the tens of gigawatts. This unique combination of high intensity, high photon energy and short pulse duration enables the investigation of electron dynamics with X-ray non-linear spectroscopy and single-particle imaging.
Compact laser-driven accelerators are versatile and powerful tools of unarguable relevance on societal grounds for the diverse purposes of science, health, security, and technology because they bring enormous practicality to state-of-the-art achievements of conventional radio-frequency accelerators. Current benchmarking laser-based technologies rely on a medium to assist the light-matter interaction, which impose material limitations or strongly inhomogeneous fields. The advent of few cycle ultra-intense radially polarized lasers has materialized an extensively studied novel accelerator that adopts the simplest form of laser acceleration and is unique in requiring no medium to achieve strong longitudinal energy transfer directly from laser to particle. Here we present the first observation of direct longitudinal laser acceleration of non-relativistic electrons that undergo highly-directional multi-GeV/m accelerating gradients. This demonstration opens a new frontier for direct laser-driven particle acceleration capable of creating well collimated and relativistic attosecond electron bunches and x-ray pulses.
Using the Madelung transformation we show that in a quantum Free Electron Laser (QFEL) the beam obeys the equations of a quantum fluid in which the potential is the classical potential plus a quantum potential. The classical limit is shown explicitly.