Speaker
Description
Over the past years, the ultra-intense laser field has continued to flourish as demonstrated by a growing number of scientific and technological projects. In particular, Europe’s commitment towards ultra-high intensity physics is exemplified by the involvement of several European countries pooling research, network resources and experience to succeed in the completion of different state of the art laser facilities.
ELI consortium represents the core of the European effort to create unique laser facilities that can explore new regimes of laser-matter interaction as has never done before. It is divided into three facilities, ELI-Beamlines in Czech Republic, ELI-NP in Romania and ELI-ALPS in Hungary, each one equipped with unique laser systems and dedicated to a particular type of physics that will be studied. Most of the laser system will be used to generate secondary sources, like electron beams, Xray beams, gamma beams etc. In particular, ELI-Beamlines facility has been designed in order to let interact beams of different nature in unique pump-probe experiments. One of the beamlines – a High Harmonic Generation Beamline - will be designed, delivered and installed by a French company ARDOP as a turn-key system generating a broadband XUV beam.
The HHG beamline has been designed to accept two driving 1 kHz laser beams with pulse duration <20 fs and energy up to 100 mJ and, to superpose and focus them on a gas cell, to filter-out the residual laser beams and to characterize the generated XUV beam. The system can generate a very broadband radiation in the XUV region (from 5nm to 120), thanks to its modular design that allows to work at different focusing geometries (focal lengths from 1 m to 20 m), the gas cell that has a variable length and the choice of different rare gases.
The beamline is composed of four meter-size vessels, a complete IR rejection system done of grazing incidence mirrors and thin metallic filters, and a diagnostic system including a focusing flat-field spectrometer, a wavefront sensor and a calibrated photodiode for photon flux measurements.
The HHG Beamline has been designed also to accommodate two parallel driving lasers, generating two parallel XUV beams. To our knowledge, this is the only HHG beamline that can generate such a broad spectrum at such high intensities.
The HHG Beamline installation in Czech Republic should start in september and will be operational by the end of 2016.
