Jon: LCLS briefing + Zara: JC: Quasi-phase-matching-induced enhancement of high-order harmonics during two-colour pump of multi-jet plasmas

Jon: LCLS: probing hole dynamics in glycine 



Zara: Quasi-phase-matching-induced enhancement of high-order harmonics during two-colour pump of multi-jet plasmas

The first demonstration of quasi-phase-matching during high-order harmonic generation (HHG) of laser radiation in multi-jet plasmas produced on the silver and chromium targets under the conditions of two-colour pump (804 and 402 nm) is presented. We analyse the enhancement of the groups of odd and even harmonics along the plateau range and compare the harmonic yields using a different number of plasma jets. The comparison of extended line plasma and multi-jet plasma shows the advanced properties of the latter formation for the efficient HHG using the two-colour pump. The 25× and 13× enhancement factors of quasi-phase-matched harmonics were obtained in the cases of the two-colour and single-colour pumps of multi-jet plasmas.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-4075/47/10/105401

http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-4075/47/10/105401/pdf/0953-4075_47_10_105401.pdf

Davide: JC: Coherent phase-matched VUV generation by field-controlled bound states

The generation of high-order harmonics1 and attosecond pulses2 at ultrahigh repetition rates (>1 MHz) promises to revolutionize ultrafast spectroscopy. Such vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and soft X-ray sources could potentially be driven directly by plasmonic enhancement of laser pulses from a femtosecond oscillator3, 4, but recent experiments suggest that the VUV signal is actually dominated by incoherent atomic line emission5, 6. Here, we demonstrate a new regime of phase-matched below-threshold harmonic generation, for which the generation and phase matching is enabled only near resonance structures of the atomic target. The coherent VUV line emission exhibits low divergence and quadratic growth with increasing target density up to nearly 1,000 torr mm and can be controlled by the sub-cycle field of a few-cycle driving laser with an intensity of only ~1 × 1013 W cm−2, which is achievable directly from few-cycle femtosecond oscillators with nanojoule energy7.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2014.83.html