technology Attosecond lAsers
Vrakking believes ELI-ALPS is coming at just the right time. ‘ELI-ALPS, because it will be a user facility, will open up this field to people who cannot do these experiments on their own,’ he says. ‘However, the success of a user facility is not just measured by the peak performance it can achieve, but also by its reliability and the level of support it offers its users. It is these, perhaps more mundane, aspects that enable researchers to perform experiments they cannot perform elsewhere.’ John Tisch, of the UK’s Imperial College,
agrees. He is part of a research group that has just been awarded more than £6m over six years by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to develop attosecond science applied to larger molecules and the condensed phase. He says: ‘As an international user facility, ELI-ALPS should be able to help meet the increasing demand for experimental facilities for attosecond science. In common with other user facilities, high-quality science will be produced at ELI-APS only if it is heavily oversubscribed, leading to healthy competition for beamline time. To achieve this, it will need to prove itself as not only having state-of-the-art specifications, but also being a reliable and robust light source with good infrastructure and support for visiting experimentalists.’ The basic structure of ELI-ALPS is clear: three unique lasers – primary light sources with varying peak powers and repetition rates to suit different applications and users. These applications include valence electron science, core electron science, sub-atomic 4D imaging, attosecond high-field science, and compact high-brilliance photon sources for biology, medicine, and industry.
Oscillator + front end 100kHz
Attosecond beamlines
2xOscillator + front end 100kHz
High-intensity beamline
OPCPA chain / stages I-VI DPSSL pump
OPCPA chain DPSSL pump
OPCPA chain DPSSL pump
2mJ /100kHz/8fs or
1J/1kHz/8fs or 0.3-1J/1 kHZ/3-5fs 1-15mJ / 10-100 kHZ / 1.5-3fs
1J/100Hz/12fs
Ti:Sapphire Ti:Sa or OPCPA
Flashlamp or DPSSL
40J/10Hz/15fs or 3-10J/1-10Hz/3-5fs
THZ & appl. Gas HHG: atto & XUV applications
Solid HHG: Atto & X-Ray
Synchronized atto/PW Facility
PW applications
the academic community involved in planning eli-Alps is currently divided about how ambitious the concept should be. the specifications in blue represent what the more cautious researchers think is achievable in the timeframe, whereas the red specifications are the more ambitious targets. dpssl – diode-pumped solid-state laser. opcpA – optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification. pW – petawatt
However, the academic community involved in planning ELI-ALPS is currently divided as to how ambitious a facility ELI-ALPS should be. Some believe it should aim to be as ambitious as possible, and aim to generate single attosecond pulses with sub-cycle laser pulses, while others want it to be a little more cautious and aim for the use of few cycle laser pulses – something that is already being achieved, but at an order
it is obvious that a system with
a more ambitious specification will produce more ambitious experiments
of magnitude lower intensity in some labs in Europe. But irrespective of what specification ELI-ALPS is built to, one thing is certain: there is a very strict and definite time limit on the development of ELI-ALPS. It is a stipulation of the EU structural fund that all of the money must be spent and reported by the end of 2015. ‘We have a huge challenge in front of us,’ says
➤ highest performance fiber optic connection for defence and aerospace applications
Laszlo Veisz, one of the scientific coordinators on the ELI-ALPS project and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. ‘I agree that plans for ELI-ALPS must be realistic and achievable in the timeframe we have been given. However, at Garching, our idea of what is achievable is perhaps more ambitious than other groups.’
It is obvious that a system with a more ambitious specification will enable more ambitious experiments. For example, taking a picture of a process with a single attosecond pulse will give a clear image of that process whereas, as Veisz explains if a system uses a train of three pulses to take a photograph of an event, it will essentially result in three photos in one. These exact details of what specification ELI- ALPS will have will be discussed at a workshop taking place in Szeged this month. By the end of April Veisz hopes the members of the scientific coordination team will have a realistic set of specifications they can work towards. Regardless of what these specifications are it is clear that the building and completion of ELI-
➤
AVIM connector
Mini-AVIM connector
DMI connector
Vacuum Feedthrough
www.diamond-
fo.com DIAMOND SA, Via dei Patrizi 5, 6616 Losone - Switzerland, Tel. +41 91 785 45 45, Fax +41 91 785 45 00,
sales@diamond-fo.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40