The development and characterization of a diode-pumped ultrashort pulse Yb:KGd(WO(4))(2) laser oscillator is reported. The laser was pumped by a 25W fiber-coupled diode laser module operating at 980 nm wavelength. In the mode-locked regime, 296 fs duration pulses centered around 1031 nm were generated at a repetition rate of 61 MHz with a total average output power of up to 3.7W, corresponding ...

The feasibility of the generation of bright ultrashort gamma-ray pulses is demonstrated in the interaction of a relativistic electron bunch with a counterpropagating tightly focused superstrong laser beam in the radiation-dominated regime. The Compton scattering spectra of gamma radiation are investigated using a semiclassical description for the electron dynamics in the laser field and a quant...

Rydberg series of C60 are reported for the first time. The Rydberg states are seen in photoelectron spectra using ultrashort pulsed-laser excitation, where the excited states formed are ionized with one further photon from the same laser pulse. The structure is observed for pulse durations as short as 100 fs with indications of residual structure for even shorter pulse excitation. The productio...

Short description of the FORTRAN-codes for an analysis of the ultrashort pulse dynamics is presented. We consider: 1) the aberration-less approximation and the momentum method for the search of the single pulse stability regions in the laser with the soft-aperture Kerr-lens mode locking; 2) the distributed complex Ginzburg-Landau model for the same aim; 3) the generalized Schrödinger equation f...

We study multi-shot intensity-and-phase measurements of unstable trains of ultrashort pulses using twodimensional spectral shearing interferometry (2DSI). We find that, like other interferometric ultrashort-laser pulse-measurement methods, it measures only the coherent artifact and so yields effectively only a lower bound to the pulse length. We also attempt to identify warning signs of pulse-s...

The interaction of intense short nanoand picosecond laser pulses with plasma leads to reach variety of important applications, including time-resolved laser induced breakdown spectroscopy LIBS (Walid Tawfik et al., 2007), soft x-ray lasers (X. F. Li et al., 1989), and laser-driven accelerators (W. P. Leemans et al., 1989). In most cases the useful output whether it be photons or accelerated par...

As many high-intensity ultrafast-optical measurements involve more than one pulse—typically one to excite a medium under study and another to probe it—a technique for measuring two pulses simultaneously is highly desirable. In two decades, two-pulse measurement techniques have advanced from ambiguity-laden to a recently developed technique that can measure a pulse pair with arbitrary central wa...

We report on new developments in wavefront and polarization control for ultrashort-pulse laser microprocessing. We use two Spatial Light Modulators in combination to structure the optical fields of a picosecond-pulse laser beam, producing vortex wavefronts and radial or azimuthal polarization states. We also carry out the first demonstration of multiple first-order beams with vortex wavefronts ...

A strongly saturated waveguide-based optical-field-ionization soft-x-ray laser seeded by high harmonic generation was demonstrated for Ni-like Kr lasing at 32.8 nm. Compared with the same laser seeded only with spontaneous emission, seeding with high harmonics yields much smaller divergence, enhanced spatial coherence, and controlled polarization. The integration of high harmonic seeding, optic...