optoelectronic world
that the phase information was correct, the researchers performed an additional experiment that favorably compared their holographic technique to an interferometric technique. Additional equations were used to recover the nonlinear index changes in the vicinity of the pump pulse using the phase information in the hologram. Comparisons of pulse propagation in air, water, and CS2 produced unique results (see figure). For example, the femtosecond pulse ionizes the air and water medium, but does not ionize the surrounding CS2 medium.
“Holography was critical in this experiment because we wanted to capture at the femtosecond scale simultaneously the amplitude and phase image that resulted from the optical nonlinearity,” said researcher Demetri Psaltis. “This method could be applied to many problems in ultrafast optics to visualize and understand the interaction of the light pulse with the medium,” added Martin Centurion, another researcher.
Gail Overton
REFERENCES:
1. M. Centurion, Y. Pu, and D. Psaltis, J. Applied Physics 100, 063104 (2006).
While the recent 10th International Conference on X-ray Lasers (ICXRL) at the Max Born Institute (MBI; Berlin, Germany) attracted more than a hundred active participants from 14 countries, it was the conference chair,
938 nm diode laser 3.0
SLOC structure
200
180
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2. 5 1. 7 mm lateral aperture width
160
2.0
Voltage (V)
1. 5
1.0
10
08
06
140
120
100
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60
Opticle output (W)
80
60
40
Conversion efficiency
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04
40
0.5
02
20
0
- 40-20 0 20 40
0
200
solid-state middlemen from the current diode-pumped solid-state pump sources by diode-pumping their amplifiers directly.
Nickles’ group at MBI was the first
to demonstrate tabletop picosecond
laser-driven soft XRLs in the late
1990s. 1 More recently, a combina-
100 tion of innovations and refinements has converged, suggesting that ultrafast tabletop XRLs will soon fit onto smaller tables. The project is funded by an industrial-technology-oriented European Union subsidy known as ProFIT, overseen by Investitionsbank Berlin.
To overhaul the Ti:sapphire-
based architecture dominant in
tabletop XRLs, the team has an-
20 nounced new high-power diodes
optimized for 938 nm emission
for ytterbium-based crystals and
0 proposed a collaboration with
thin-disk amplifier expert Ad-
olf Giesen from the Institute für
Strahlwerkzeuge (Stuttgart, Ger-
many). Noting improvements in
diode lasers, ytterbium materials,
and management of thermal is-
sues in thin-disk amplifiers, their
proposed system would provide sub-
10 ps pulses at 13. 9 nm with a repetition
rate of 100 Hz—nearly 10 times higher
than any other XRL. The stability inher-
0.0
0 50 100 150
Current (A)
A high-power laser diode with a super-large opti-cal-cavity (SLOC) structure is intended for pumping ytterbium-doped amplifiers for x-ray lasers. It emits at high power and high efficiency from an aperture with a 1. 7 mm lateral width.
MBI’s Peter Nickles, who put forward the most revolutionary idea for tabletop x-ray-laser (XRL) design. His group proposes to remove one of the
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