Scientists at the LOA (Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée) in France have achieved a breakthrough by successfully driving a plasma mirror at a rate of 1,000 shots per second in the relativistic regime. This involves using a laser field with such intensity that it causes the plasma electrons to oscillate at nearly the speed of light.
For the first time, scientists were successful at driving at a thousand shots per second a so-called plasma mirror in the relativistic regime, i.e. with a laser field so strong that hurls the plasma electrons back and forth at nearly the speed of light. The feat was accomplished at the LOA (Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée) in France.
When an intense laser pulse ionizes the surface of a solid target, it creates plasma so dense that it is impenetrable to the laser, even if the target was initially transparent. The laser now gets reflected off this “plasma mirror.” In the relativistic regime, the mirror surface no longer just sits stills but is driven to oscillate so fast that, through a process called relativistic surface high-harmonic generation (SHHG), it temporally compresses the laser’s electromagnetic field cycles. This concentrates the laser energy further in time and makes plasma mirrors a promising path for the generation of ever more intense and shorter laser pulses.
Schematics of the experimental setup for SHHG and electron acceleration on a kHz plasma mirror. Credit: Ultrafast Science
Their use and fine control does, however, place extremely high demands on the driving laser such as pristine spatiotemporal pulse quality and temporal contrast, as well as a huge peak power of terawatts, i.e. thousands of gigawatts. This had only been achieved in single-shot experiments made with much bigger lasers that operate at ≤ 10 Hz repetition rate. The team around Stefan Haessler and Rodrigo Lopez-Martens now report evidence for relativistic SHHG driven at kilohertz repetition rate. Simultaneously with the SHHG emission, a correlated beam of relativistic electrons is observed. This is a major step from hitherto few-shot exploratory experiments toward a usable secondary radiation and particle source for applications.
A key element for this progress is the in-house developed kilohertz repetition rate terawatt laser, providing pulse durations down to <4 femtoseconds and a temporal contrast ratio (between the pulse intensity at its peak and 10 picoseconds before) of 1010. The other is the laser-plasma interaction platform that is adapted to the high repetition rate and enables fine control of the interaction conditions. This is achieved notably through a preceding laser pulse which initiates the plasma creation and expansion. Varying the time delay after which the subsequent main driving pulse is fired lets the researchers control the nanometer-range density gradient on the plasma mirror surface. For the first time, the effect of this gradient has been studied in detail for three increasingly short and intense driving pulses.
In a next step, the scientists plan to work on refocusing the radiation reflected off the plasma mirror and target reaching record-high light intensities for light pulses shorter than a femtosecond.
Reference: “High-Harmonic Generation and Correlated Electron Emission from Relativistic Plasma Mirrors at 1 kHz Repetition Rate” by Stefan Haessler, Marie Ouillé, Jaismeen Kaur, Maïmouna Bocoum, Frederik Böhle, Dan Levy, Louis Daniault, Aline Vernier, Jérôme Faure and Rodrigo Lopez-Martens, 28 June 2022, Ultrafast Science.
DOI: 10.34133/2022/9893418
This work was supported by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR-11-EQPX-005-ATTOLAB and ANR-14- CE32-0011-03 APERO), Investissements d’Avenir Program LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM), European Research Council (ERC FEMTOELEC 306708 and ERC ExCoMet 694596), Laserlab-Europe (H2020-EU.1.4.1.2. grant agreement ID 654148), and Région Ile-de-France (SESAME 2012-ATTOLITE).
