High-harmonic generation from plasma mirrors at kilohertz repetition rate

Fabien Quéré (1)

1 SPAM - Service des Photons, Atomes et Molécules

We report the first demonstration of high-harmonic generation from plasma mirrors at a 1 kHz repetition rate. Harmonics up to nineteenth order are generated at peak intensities close to 1018 W=cm2 by focusing 1 mJ, 25 fs laser pulses down to 1:7 μm FWHM spot size without any prior wavefront correction onto a moving target. We minimize target surface motion with respect to the laser focus using online interferometry to ensure reproducible interaction conditions for every shot and record data at 1 kHz with unprecedented statistics. This allows us to unambiguously identify coherent wake emission as the main generation mechanism

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Fabien Quéré. High-harmonic generation from plasma mirrors at kilohertz repetition rate. Optics Letters, 2011, 36, pp.1461. ⟨hal-00716180⟩