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Generation of High-Flux Attosecond Pulses and Towards Attosecond-Attosecond Pump-Probe Experiments

At present, the energy of a single isolated attosecond pulse is limited to nanojoule levels. As a result, an intense femtosecond pulse has always been used in combination with a weak attosecond pulse in time-resolved experiments. To reach the goal of conducting true attosecond pump-attosecond probe experiments, a high flux laser source has been developed that can potentially deliver microjoule level isolated attosecond pulses in the 50 eV range, and a unique experimental end station has been fabricated and implemented that can provide precision control of the attosecond-attosecond pump-probe pulses. In order to scale up the attosecond flux, a unique Ti:-Sapphire laser system with a three-stage amplifier that delivers pulses with a 2 J energy at a 10 Hz repetition rate was designed and built. The broadband pulse spectrum covering from 700 nm to 900 nm was generated, supporting a pulse duration of 12 fs. The high flux high-order harmonics were generated in a gas tube filled with argon by a loosely focused geometry under a phase-matching condition. The wavefront distortions for the driving laser were corrected by a deformable mirror with a Shack-Hartmann sensor to significantly improve the extreme ultraviolet radiation conversion efficiency due to the excellent beam profile at focus. A high-damage-threshold beam splitter is demonstrated to eliminate energetic driving laser pulses from high-order harmonics. The extreme ultraviolet pulse energy is measured to be 0.3 microjoule at the exit of the argon gas target. The experimental facilities developed will lead to the generation of microjoule level isolated attosecond pulses and the demonstration of true atto pump-atto probe experiments in near future. Finally, in experiment, we show the first demonstration of carrier-envelope phase controlled filamentation in air using millijoule-level few-cycle mid-infrared laser pulses.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-6760
Date01 January 2017
CreatorsWang, Yang
PublisherUniversity of Central Florida
Source SetsUniversity of Central Florida
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations

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