An attosecond pump-probe scheme that combines the use of a free-electron laser pulse with an ultrashort pulse is applied in order to explore the ultrafast excitation dynamics in Ne. We describe the multielectron dynamics using a new nonperturbative time-dependent R-matrix theory. This theory enables the interaction of ultrashort light fields with multielectron atoms and atomic ions to be determ...

Frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) is a technique to measure ultrashort laser pulses that optically constructs a spectrogram of a laser pulse. A two-dimensional (2-D) phase retrieval algorithm is used to extract the intensity and phase of a pulse from its spectrogram. We have improved a recently presented principal component generalized projections algorithm (PCGPA) making it easier to im...

During the last years it was shown that time-resolved digital holography (TRDH), combining the conventional offaxis digital holography and ultrashort probing laser pulses results in versatile tool suitable for ultra-fast phenomena studies. The temporal resolution of this method depends on the duration of the used ultrashort probing pulses and measurements could be performed in temporal range fr...

Traditionally nanosecond laser pulses have been used for Laser-induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for quantitative and qualitative analysis of the samples. Laser produced plasmas using nanosecond laser pulses have been studied extensively since 1960s. With the advent of short and ultrashort laser pulses, there has been a growing interest in the applications of femtosecond and picosecond lase...

Femtosecond pulses are used in many fields due to their specificities of extreme short duration, ultra high peak power or large spectral bandwidth. Since the early days of the laser in the 60s, there has been a continous quest to generate shorter and or higher peak power pulses. Reliable generation of pulses below 100fs occurred the first time in 1981 with the invention of the colliding pulse m...

In ultrashort pulse ͑Ͻ10 ps͒ laser ablation of dielectrics, affected materials are first transformed into absorbing plasma with metallic properties and, then, the subsequent laser-plasma interaction causes material removals. For ultrashort-pulse laser ablation of dielectrics, this study proposes a model using the Fokker-Planck equation for electron density distribution, a plasma model for the opt...

Previous pulse-width measurement methods for ultrashort laser pulses have broadly employed nonlinear effects; thus any of these previous methods may experience problems relating to nonlinear effects. Here we present a new pulse-width measuring method based on the linear selfdiffraction effect. Because the Talbot effect of a grating with ultrashort laser pulse illumination is different from that...

Ultrashort optical pulses are integral to various fields. Thus, the characterization of these pulses is crucial in understanding the results of experiments and applications using them. A diagnostic for laser systems was created to determine the shapes of ultrashort optical pulses using the principle of spectral shearing interferometry (SSI). By strongly chirping an optical pulse using a pair of...

We demonstrate that a beam of x-ray radiation can be generated by simply focusing a single high-intensity laser pulse into a gas jet. A millimeter-scale laser-produced plasma creates, accelerates, and wiggles an ultrashort and relativistic electron bunch. As they propagate in the ion channel produced in the wake of the laser pulse, the accelerated electrons undergo betatron oscillations, genera...