No Arabic abstract
Lead-magnesium niobate lead-titanate (PMN-PT) has been proven as an excellent material for sensing and actuating applications. The fabrication of advanced ultra-small PMN-PT-based devices relies on the availability of sophisticated procedures for the micro-machining of PMN-PT thin films or bulk substrates. Approaches reported up to date include chemical etching, excimer laser ablation and ion milling. To ensure an excellent device performance, a key mandatory feature for a micro-machining process is to preserve as far as possible the crystalline quality of the substrates; in other words, the fabrication method must induce a low density of cracks and other kind of defects. In this work, we demonstrate a relatively fast procedure for the fabrication of high-quality PMN-PT micro-machined actuators employing green femtosecond laser pulses. The fabricated devices feature absence of extended cracks and well defined edges with relatively low roughness, which is advantageous for the further integration of nanomaterials onto the piezoelectric actuators.
In recent years it became possible to align molecules in free space using ultrashort laser pulses. Here we explore two schemes for controlling molecule-surface scattering process, which are based on the laser-induced molecular alignment. In the first scheme, a single ultrashort non-resonant laser pulse is applied to a molecular beam hitting the surface. This pulse modifies the angular distribution of the incident molecules, and causes the scattered molecules to rotate with a preferred sense of rotation (clockwise or counter-clockwise). In the second scheme, two properly delayed laser pulses are applied to a molecular beam composed of two chemically close molecular species (isotopes, or nuclear spin isomers). As the result of the double pulse excitation, these species are selectively scattered to different angles after the collision with the surface. These effects may provide new means for the analysis and separation of molecular mixtures.
We consider solid surface scattering of molecules that were subject to strong non-resonant ultrashort laser pulses just before hitting the surface. The pulses modify the rotational states of the molecules, causing their field free alignment, or a rotation with a preferred sense. We show that field-free laser-induced molecular alignment leads to correlations between the scattering angle and the sense of rotation of the scattered molecules. Moreover, by controlling the sense of laser induced unidirectional molecular rotation, one may affect the scattering angle of the molecules. This provides a new means for separation of mixtures of molecules (such as isotopes and nuclear-spin isomers) by laser controlled surface scattering.
We report on experimental results in a new regime of a relativistic light-matter interaction employing mid-infrared (3.9-micrometer wavelength) high-intensity femtosecond laser pulses. In the laser generated plasma, the electrons reach relativistic energies already at rather low intensities due to the fortunate lambda^2-scaling of the kinetic energy with the laser wavelength. The lower intensity suppresses optical field ionization and creation of the pre-plasma at the rising edge of the laser pulse efficiently, enabling an enhanced efficient vacuum heating of the plasma. The lower critical plasma density for long-wavelength radiation can be surmounted by using nanowires instead of flat targets. In our experiments about 80% of the incident laser energy has been absorbed resulting in a long living, keV-temperature, high-charge state plasma with a density of more than three orders of magnitude above the critical value. Our results pave the way to laser-driven experiments on laboratory astrophysics and nuclear physics at a high repetition rate.
The paper describes heterostructures spontaneously formed in PMN-PT single crystals cooled under bias electric field applied along [001]pc and then zero-field-heated in the vicinity of the so-called depoling temperature. In particular, formation of lamellar structures composed of tetragonal-like and rhombohedral-like layers extending over macroscopic (mm) lengths is demonstrated by optical observations and polarized Raman investigations.
We study a model for frustrated tunneling ionization using ultrashort laser pulses. The model is based on the strong field approximation and it employs the saddle point approximation to predict quasiclassical trajectories that are captured on Rydberg states. We present a classification of the saddle-point solutions and explore their behavior as functions of angular momentum of the final state, as well as the carrier--envelope phase (CEP) of the laser pulse. We compare the final state population computed by the model to results obtained by numerical propagation of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (TDSE) for the hydrogen atom. While we find qualitative agreement in the CEP dependence of the populations in principal quantum numbers, $n$, the populations to individual angular momentum channels, $ell$, are found to be inconsistent between model and TDSE. Thus, our results show that improvements of the quasiclassical trajectories are in order for a quantitative model of frustrated tunneling ionizaiton.