ELI Research Consortium Begins Construction, Technology Development

The Extreme Light Infrastructure research consortium has begun construction of its Attosecond Light Pulse Source laboratory, along with technology development.

Set to open in 2018, the facility its set to house a few-cycle pulsed laser that recently claimed a record-high average power level of 216 W with a pulse duration of 6.3 fs at a central wavelength of 980 nm. This corresponds to a pulse energy of 170 µJ at 1.27 MHz. According to the development group, led by Steffen Hädrich of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, the average power is about one order of magnitude higher than laser systems employing optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification.

The few-cycle attosecond laser is one of the core technologies envisioned for the ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source facility. According to the Jena team, the laboratory wants to provide users with a beam line running a 1-mJ, sub-two-cycle laser producing 100-W average power at a repetition rate of 100 kHz. Such a system could generate soft x-rays with high photon flux.