| The Table-Top Soft X-Ray Laser Lab - The Balmer Group |
Investigating laser-produced plasmas is of considerable importance to many research fields, such as inertial fusion, short-wavelength laboratory sources, next generation lithography and water-window bio-microscopy. By generation of a line focus on a target material, using a Tera-Watt laser driver, the induced plasma column behaves like a single-pass gain medium. Amplification by stimulated emission (ASE) has been achieved in the soft x-ray spectral region with extremely narrow linewidths of <10-4 (rel. width) and 10+11 photons/shot.
Our research focuses on two main areas:
- X-ray laser fundamentals, such as enhancement of conversion efficiency, efficient grazing-incidence pumping (GRIP), and generation of shorter and shorter wavelength (e.g. <10 nm) at saturated emission in a laboratory-scale facility;
- Increase of the X-ray laser repetition rate from the single-shot up to a few Hz.
The experiments are carried out on the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) Nd:glass laser system at our institute ("BeAGLE" or Bern Advanced Glass Laser for Experiments), which is capable of delivering up to 30 J in a 1-ps duration pulse. The experiments are complemented by a suite of in-house available computational codes for optical design, plasma dynamics and atomic physics. |
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