Gigawatt-class, tabletop, isolated-attosecond-pulse light source
Bing Xue, Katsumi Midorikawa, Eiji J. Takahashi
Abstract
Powerful and stable attosecond pulse sources have the potential for wide application in ultrafast science. For this purpose, we have produced a soft X-ray supercontinuum with a pulse energy of 0.24 µJ using high-order harmonics from a multi-terawatt, 10 Hz, three-channel waveform synthesizer [ Sci. Adv. 6 , eaay2802 ( 2020 ) STAMCV 1468-6996 10.1126/sciadv.aay2802 ]. Here, we report an attosecond streaking scheme that is designed to measure this isolated attosecond pulse at a low-repetition rate. We retrieved a pulse duration of 226 attoseconds (as), demonstrating the realization of 1.1 gigawatt isolated as pulses on a tabletop, which compares favorably to an X-ray free-electron laser in a large facility.