Demonstration of a Circularly Polarized Plasma-Based Soft-X-Ray Laser

Adrien Depresseux (1) , E. Oliva (2) , Julien Gautier (1) , Fabien Tissandier (1) , Guillaume Lambert (1) , Boris Vodungbo (1) , Jean-Philippe Goddet (1) , Amar Tafzi (1) , J. Nejdl (3) , M. Kozlova (3) , G. Maynard (2) , H. t. Kim (4, 5) , Kim Ta Phuoc (1) , Antoine Rousse (1) , Philippe Zeitoun (1) , Stéphane Sebban (1)

1 LOA - Laboratoire d'optique appliquée
2 LPGP - Laboratoire de physique des gaz et des plasmas
3 Institute of Physics [Prague]
4 Advanced Photonics Research Institute, GIST
5 Center for Relativistic Laser Science, Institute for Basic Science (IBS)

We report the first experimental demonstration of a laser-driven circularly polarized soft-x-ray laser chain. It has been achieved by seeding a 32.8 nm Kr ix plasma amplifier with a high-order harmonic beam, which has been circularly polarized using a four-reflector polarizer. Our measurements testify that the amplified radiation maintains the initial polarization of the seed pulse in good agreement with our Maxwell-Bloch modeling. The resulting fully circular soft-x-ray laser beam exhibits a Gaussian profile and yields about 1010 photons per shot, fulfilling the requirements for laboratory-scale photon-demanding application experiments.

Domaines: Physique [physics]

Adrien Depresseux, E. Oliva, Julien Gautier, Fabien Tissandier, Guillaume Lambert, et al.. Demonstration of a Circularly Polarized Plasma-Based Soft-X-Ray Laser. Physical Review Letters, 2015, 115 (8), pp.Physical Review Letter. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.083901⟩. ⟨hal-01199279⟩