Abstract

Recently there has been significant progress in the development of high repetition rate, high peak power Ti:sapphire systems. [1] Many experiments in high field science require peak powers of 0.1-1.0 TW, and therefore this new generation of high-average power lasers will have a great impact on the quality and utility of experiments in this area. For example, recent experiments in high harmonic generation (HHG) have demonstrated that with sufficiently short laser pulses (~ 20 fs), laser energies of 2 - 10 mJ can be used to generate very high order harmonics, with photon energy up to 240 eV. [2,3] However, to date, the lasers used to generate very high-order harmonics have typically been low repetition-rate (10 Hz) systems. A kHz repetition-rate laser with sufficient peak power for high harmonic generation would result in a 100 times increase in x-ray flux, with vastly improved signal-to-noise ratios. In addition, other processes such as low-order harmonic generation in gases[4] become even more efficient with millijoules of laser energy, and will be capable of generating sufficient flux for application experiments in chemical dynamics.

© 1997 Optical Society of America