The 10 Hz repetition rate HF-2PW laser of ELI ALPS, which was designed to operate at 300 W average power, is being commissioned during the first ramping up phase. The system is currently running at the 10 J energy level and full energy compression was demonstrated for >2 hours of continuous operation with a pulse duration of 23 fs. Day-to-day operation represents an important milestone among next generation high peak and average power laser systems. During this period, fine tuning of pulse parameters, investigation of stability and reliability of the system is performed. Valuable experiences during operation are discussed in this paper.
The production of short-pulse, coherent, XUV radiation by High Harmonic Generation (HHG) has become a routine operation in many laboratories equipped with an intense femtosecond Titanium-Sapphire laser. The required intensity of 1014 to 1015 W.cm-2 is easily reached with 1 - 2 mJ, 40 - 100 fs pulses focused by a long focal length lens (1m). The most usual medium for HHG is a noble gas. Xenon or argon are the most efficient ones (with efficiencies of the order of 10-5) while neon and helium allow for the generation of the shortest wavelengths (2 - 4 nm) albeit with a reduced efficiency (10-9 - 10-8). For symmetry reasons, only the odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency are generated and a typical spectrum like the one in Fig. 1 consists of narrow lines separated by twice the fundamental photon energy (1.55x2 eV in the case of Ti:Sap lasers). The harmonic pulses are naturally synchronized with the pump pulse and usually much shorter. This latter property combined to the high brightness, coherence and directivity of HH make them ideal for pump-probe experiments and particularly for multicolor- multiphoton transitions requiring a spatio-temporal overlap of the IR and XUV pulses. Such applications have been carried out in atomic and molecular and solid state Physics. The present work is about recent studies of multiphoton ionization of rare gas atoms by a superposition of HH and IR pulses and their applications to the metrology of femto and attosecond XUV pulses produced by HHG.
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