Gain dynamics in a soft-X-ray laser amplifier perturbed by a strong injected X-ray field

Abstract : Seeding soft-X-ray plasma amplifiers with high harmonics has been demonstrated to generate high-brightness soft-X-ray laser pulses with full spatial and temporal coherence. The interaction between the injected coherent field and the swept-gain medium has been modelled. However, no experiment has been conducted to probe the gain dynamics when perturbed by a strong external seed field. Here, we report the first X-ray pump–X-ray probe measurement of the nonlinear response of a plasma amplifier perturbed by a strong soft-X-ray ultra-short pulse. We injected a sequence of two time-delayed high-harmonic pulses (λ = 18.9 nm) into a collisionally excited nickel-like molybdenum plasma to measure with femtosecond resolution the gain depletion induced by the saturated amplification of the high-harmonic pump and its subsequent recovery. The measured fast gain recovery in 1.5–1.75 ps confirms the possibility to generate ultra-intense, fully phase-coherent soft-X-ray lasers by chirped pulse amplification in plasma amplifiers.