ALADIN Highlights

The Joint Research Activity ALADIN exploits the recent progress of the new advanced generation of versatile and userfriendly ultrafast sources, to proliferate attosecond technology to a broad user community and to explore the full potential of these magic light sources in innovative science experiments. Many outstanding contributions to this goal have been made so far, a few highlights are introduced here.

A temporal gating on the HHG process was achieved at POLIMI by using an intense 20-fs, 1.45-μm pulse (IR) in combination with an intense 13-fs, 0.8-μm pulse: a coherent continuous emission extending up to 160 eV using Ar and 200 eV using Ne has been efficiently generated.

CELIA has developed a setup for harmonic generation at very high repetition rate by using a diode pumped femtosecond system. This allows to generate high order harmonic at adjustable repetition rate ranging from 100 kHz to 1 MHz.

The stereo-ATI phase meter has been improved such that single-shot operation is possible (MPQ, FSU). In addition, further improvements were made which allow real-time performance and phase measurement for pulses up to 10fs (FSU).

In a collaborative experiment of MPQ, RAL and FORTH at the MPQ-ATLAS laser system (800mJ, 40fs, 10Hz) the first 2nd order intensity volume autocorrelation measurement of a superposition of harmonics 10-14, emitted by laser surface plasma has been successfully implemented.

At MBI, a new XUV/IR pump-probe beam line has been set up that is coupled to a reaction microscope. It now allows for using the whole generated harmonic spectrum beyond ~17 eV for pump-probe experiments.

SLIC has applied HHG to nanoscale imaging by coherent XUV diffraction (CDI). Single-shot CDI and Fourier transform holography have been demonstrated on static samples.

A new high-intensity 10-Hz HHG beam line has been set up at LLC. A two-colour driving field is used to optimize the generation process. A double gas jet enables the use of gas mixtures to improve phase matching as well as high-harmonics generation where harmonics are seeded by harmonics.

Sequence of harmonic spectra generated in Argon as a function of the delay between the two-color pulses (logarithmic color map)	High-order harmonic spectra (number of photons) generated in argon by VIS pulses (dashed curve) and two-color pulses at zero delay (solid curve)