Picosecond Soft X-Ray Laser Pulses from an Injection-Seeded Plasma Amplifier

Abstract

Compact soft X-ray laser (SXRL) plasma amplifiers have been used to generate intense pulses ranging from 5 picoseconds to nanosecond duration, governed by the duration of the gain. The recent demonstration of injection seeded SXRL creates a fundamentally new regime for generating short SXRL pulses in which the pulsewidth is governed by the amplifier bandwidth<br />and is independent of gain duration. In a recent experiment, we measured the duration of phase-coherent SXRL pulses from an injection-seeded plasma amplifier created by irradiating a solid target. The result shows a pulse from an SXRL plasma amplifier of approximately 1.1 ps.