Generating X-rays that have the properties of laser light has been a long-standing goal for experimental science. Here we describe the emission of highly collimated, spatially coherent X-rays, at a wavelength of about 1 nanometre and at photon energies extending to 1.3 kiloelectronvolts, from atoms that have been ionized by a 5-femtosecond laser pulse. This means that a laboratory source of laser-like, kiloelectronvolt X-rays, which will operate on timescales relevant to many chemical, biological and materials problems, is now within reach.

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Coherent soft-x-ray radiation up to photon energies of 700 eV is obtained by focusing several-mJ, 10-fs near infrared laser pulses into a He gas jet. The observed nearly constant photon yield over several hundred eVs may be attributed to nonadiabatic self-phase matching, originating from a substantial ionization within a fraction of the optical cycle of the driving laser pulse.

By irradiating He and Ne atoms with 3mJ, 12fs, near infrared laser pulses from a tabletop laser system, the authors generated spatially and temporally coherent x rays up to a photon energy of 3.5keV. With this source it is possible to use high-harmonic radiation for x-ray absorption spectroscopy in the keV range. They were able to clearly resolve the L absorption edges of titanium and copper and the K edges of aluminum and silicon. From the fine structure of the x-ray absorption they estimated the interatomic distances.

© 2016 [Optical Society of America]. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modifications of the content of this paper are prohibited.Optical amplifiers in all ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum exhibit an essential characteristic, namely the input signal during the propagation in the amplifier medium is multiplied by the avalanche effect of the stimulated emission to produce exponential growth. We perform a theoretical study motivated and supported by experimental data on a He gas amplifier driven by intense 30-fs-long laser pulses and seeded with attosecond pulse trains generated in a separated Ne gas jet. We demonstrate that the strong-field theory in the frame of high harmonic generation fully supports the appearance of the avalanche effect in the amplification of extreme ultraviolet attosecond pulse trains. We theoretically separate and identify different physical processes taking part in the interaction and we demonstrate that X-ray parametric amplification dominates over others. In particular, we identify strong-field mediated intrapulse X-ray parametric processes as decisive for amplification at the single-atom level. We confirm that the amplification takes place at photon energies where the amplifier is seeded and when the seed pulses are perfectly synchronized with the driving strong field in the amplifier. Furthermore, propagation effects, phase matching and seed synchronization can be exploited to tune the amplified spectral range within the seed bandwidth.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

We report the first experimental demonstration of the parametric amplification of attosecond pulse trains at around 11 nm. The helium amplifier is driven by intense laser pulses and seeded by high-order harmonics pulses generated in a neon gas jet. Our measurements suggest that amplification takes place only if the seed pulse-trains are perfectly synchronized in time with the driving laser field in the amplifier. Varying the delay, we estimate the durations of the individual extreme ultraviolet pulses within the train to be on the order of 0.2 fs. Our results demonstrate that strong-field parametric amplification can be a suitable tool to amplify weak attosecond pulses from non-destructive pump-probe experiments and it is an important step towards designing amplifiers for realization of energetic XUV pulses with sub-femtosecond duration using compact lasers fitting in university laboratories.

We present a detailed theoretical description of laser driven x-ray parametric amplification, which has been experimentally demonstrated by Seres et al. [Nature Phys. 6, 455 (2010)] together with a supporting basic model. The process is based on the parametric interaction of an x-ray photon with a laser accelerated electron in a Coulomb field. With the extended model we are able to estimate the gain cross section also for a finite energy distribution of the interacting electrons as well as to consider dephasing between the electrons and the x-ray field. The improved model is capable of describing the recent experimental findings much more accurately.