Speaker: Matthew Praeger
Date: Wednesday 5th November 2008
Time: 2pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Building 46
A capillary based high harmonic generation system was developed and used to produce a coherent beam of soft x-rays. A series of experiments were carried out in order to deepen our knowledge of the HHG process and to optimise the performance of the source. Details of the following experiments will be included: Measurement of the spectral output of the system as a function of gas pressure, laser power, and laser spectral. Development of a novel laser mode quality measuring device (laser mode quality strongly affects the efficiency of the capillary launch). An analysis technique for recovering spatially-resolved spectral information about a beam by studying the Fresnel diffraction pattern produced at an array of apertures. Pulse compression using cascaded quadratic nonlinearity for spectral broadening.