The influence of atmospheric turbulence on the coherence of a dual-frequency laser beam is studied experimentally. An atmospheric turbulence simulator is inserted in one arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. A single frequency laser beam and a dual-frequency laser beam with a frequency difference of 100 MHz travel through the interferometer, respectively. The visibilities of the interference fringes of the single and dual-frequency laser beams under different turbulent forces are compared. When the turbulence becomes stronger, the visibilities of the interference pattern of the single frequency interferometer decrease more rapidly. This shows that the atmospheric turbulence has less influence on the coherence of the dual-frequency laser beam. The linewidths broadened by the turbulence are calculated with the Wiener-Khintchine theory.
Abstract. In order to achieve the two-dimensional (2-D) velocity measurement of a flow field at extreme condition, a 2-D interferometric Rayleigh scattering (IRS) velocimetry using a multibeam probe laser was developed. The method using a multibeam probe laser can record the reference interference signal and the flow interference signal simultaneously. What is more, this method can solve the problem of signal overlap using the laser sheet detection method. The 2-D IRS measurement system was set up with a multibeam probe laser, aspherical lens collection optics, and a solid Fabry-Perot etalon. A multibeam probe laser with 0.5-mm intervals was formed by collimating a laser sheet passing through a cylindrical microlens arrays. The aspherical lens was used to enhance the intensity of the Rayleigh scattering signal. The 2-D velocity field results of a Mach 1.5 air flow were obtained. The velocity in the flow center is about 450 m∕s. The reconstructed results fit well with the characteristic of flow, which indicate the validity of this technique.
The electron beam generated in laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) has two main initial weaknesses – a large beam divergence (up to a few milliradians) and a few percent level energy spread. They reduce the beam brightness and worsen the coherence of the LPA-based light source. To achieve fully coherent radiation, several methods have been proposed for generating strong microbunching on LPA beams. In these methods, a seed laser is used to induce an angular modulation into the electron beam, and the angular modulation is converted into a strong density modulation through a beamline with nonzero longitudinal position and transverse angle coupling. In this paper, an alternative method to generate microbunching into the LPA beam by using a seed laser that induces an energy modulation and transverse–longitudinal coupling beamlines that convert the energy modulation into strong density modulation is proposed. Compared with the angular modulation methods, the proposed method can use more than one order of magnitude lower seed laser power to achieve similar radiation performance. Simulations show that with the proposed method a coherent pulse of a few microjoules pulse energy and femtosecond duration can be generated with a typical LPA beam.
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