Abstract

Titanium:sapphire based oscillator-amplifier systems employing chirped-pulse-amplification technique opened ways in building compact table-top sources for high-intensity optical pulses in the last few years. Working at kHz repetition rate, the generation of pulses of terawatt peak power has been demonstrated using multistage amplifiers. We presented previously a multipass amplifier system, delivering about 20fs 0.1 TW pulses from a single amplifier stage at 1 kHz repetition rate [1]. After amplification the pulse duration was further reduced by a factor of 3 by a hollow fiber chirped mirror compressor. These very short pulses are ideally suited for the generation of high harmonic radiation down into the water window [2]. For spectroscopic applications a higher x-ray flux is often required. So far, the only promising way to increase the flux of water window x-rays is increasing the laser energy without compromising other pulse parameters such as pulse duration.

© 2000 IEEE