An experimental technique for single-shot generation of the sonogram of an ultrashort laser pulse is demonstrated. The method is based on the time gating of a spectrally decomposed test signal, transferring its spectral phase into a spatial phase, and the spatial filtering of the signal to produce a sonogram. The technique is evaluated experimentally, producing sonograms for linearly and nonlin...

Based on a combined scheme of doubled chirped-pulse amplification and a femtosecond noncollinear optical-parametric amplifier, a high-contrast femtosecond laser pulse with energy of up to 32.3 J has been generated by improving the gain efficiency and boosting the pump energy to 120 J in the final amplifier. Our measurements show that the contrast ratio of the main laser pulse is around 10(10) w...

Relatively weak counterpropagating light is shown to disrupt the emission of laser high-harmonic generation. Harmonic orders ranging from the teens to the low thirties produced by a 30-femtosecond pulse in a narrow argon jet are "shut down" with a contrast as high as 2 orders of magnitude by a chirped 1-picosecond counterpropagating laser pulse (60 times less intense). Alternatively, under poor...

In this paper, we propose a scheme to generate tunable coherent X-ray radiation for future light source applications. This scheme uses an energy chirped electron beam, a laser modulator, a laser chirper and two bunch compressors to generate a prebunched kilo-Ampere current electron beam from a few tens Ampere electron beam out of a linac. The initial modulation energy wavelength can be compress...

We demonstrate the operation of a gain-saturated table-top soft x-ray laser at 100 Hz repetition rate. The laser generates an average power of 0.15 mW at λ=18.9  nm, the highest laser power reported to date from a sub-20-nm wavelength compact source. Picosecond laser pulses of 1.5 μJ energy were produced at λ=18.9  nm by amplification in a Mo plasma created by tailoring the temporal intensity p...

We present our research on the high energy picosecond laser operating at a repetition rate of 1 kHz and the high average power picosecond laser running at 100 kHz based on bulk Nd-doped crystals. With diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) hybrid amplifiers consisting of a picosecond oscillator, a regenerative amplifier, end-pumped single-pass amplifiers, and a side-pumped amplifier, an output energy ...

We report the uninterrupted operation of an 18.9 nm wavelength tabletop soft x-ray laser at 100 Hz repetition rate for extended periods of time. An average power of about 0.1 mW was obtained by irradiating a Mo target with pulses from a compact diode-pumped chirped pulse amplification Yb:YAG laser. Series of up to 1.8 x 10(5) consecutive laser pulses of ~1 µJ energy were generated by displacing...

The pedestal (prepulse and postpulse) associated with a chirped-pulse-amplification (CPA) laser is studied. Four components have been identified that contribute to the pedestal. Pulses are spectrally shaped by gain narrowing in a frequency-matched, regenerative amplifier, while self-phase modulation is avoided. The intensity contrast is further improved through the use of a saturable absorber, ...

We demonstrate the direct generation of 55 fs pulses from an all-fiber Erbium-doped ring laser oscillator using the nonlinear polarization rotation mode-locking. The average output power is 56.4 mW but limited by available pump power of 330 mW. The linear chirped pulse duration is 55 fs after recompression using standard single-mode fiber. The pulses show to resist optical wave breaking with a ...

194 LLE Review, Volume 99 Introduction Optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification1,2 (OPCPA) is well suited for the front end of modern petawatt glass laser chains.3 The broadband gain available with OPCPA at a wavelength of 1053 nm offsets the gain narrowing that occurs in large Nd-doped glass amplifiers.4 It can be scaled to large energies,5 in contrast to the practical limits imposed by ...