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Echo-enabled harmonics up to the 75th order from precisely tailored electron beams

Nature Photonics volume 10, pages 512–515 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The production of coherent radiation at ever shorter wavelengths has been a long-standing challenge since the invention of lasers1,2 and the subsequent demonstration of frequency doubling3. Modern X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) use relativistic electrons to produce intense X-ray pulses on few-femtosecond timescales4,5,6. However, the shot noise that seeds the amplification produces pulses with a noisy spectrum and limited temporal coherence. To produce stable transform-limited pulses, a seeding scheme called echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) has been proposed7,8, which harnesses the highly nonlinear phase mixing of the celebrated echo phenomenon9 to generate coherent harmonic density modulations in the electron beam with conventional lasers. Here, we report on a demonstration of EEHG up to the 75th harmonic, where 32 nm light is produced from a 2,400 nm laser. We also demonstrate that individual harmonic amplitudes are controlled by simple adjustment of the phase mixing. Results show the potential of laser-based manipulations to achieve precise control over the coherent spectrum in future X-ray FELs for new science10,11.

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Figure 1: Schematic layout of the echo beam line and evolution of the electron-beam phase space after successive transformations.
Figure 2: Echo harmonics of the 2,400 nm laser in the 60th harmonic range.
Figure 3: Echo in the 75th harmonic range.
Figure 4: Tuning harmonics with dispersion.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank D. McCormick, K. Jobe, I. Makasyuk, T. Beukers, C. Hudspeth, J. Cruz, V. Yakimenko and the rest of the Test Facilities Group for their support. The authors also thank M. Guehr for his guidance with the design and construction of the EUV spectrometer and E. Johnson for the VISA undulator. This work was supported by the US DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences under award no. 2012-SLAC-10032 using the SLAC NLCTA facility, which is partly supported by US DOE Office of High Energy Physics under contract no. DE-AC02-76SF00515. The work of D.X. was supported by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (grant no. 2015CB859700) and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11327902).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, 94025, California, USA

    E. Hemsing, M. Dunning, B. Garcia, C. Hast, T. Raubenheimer & G. Stupakov

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (Ministry of Education), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    D. Xiang

  3. Collaborative Innovation Center of IFSA (CICIFSA), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    D. Xiang

Authors
  1. E. Hemsing
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  2. M. Dunning
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  3. B. Garcia
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  4. C. Hast
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  5. T. Raubenheimer
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  6. G. Stupakov
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  7. D. Xiang
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Contributions

G.S. conceived the original EEHG theoretical concept, which, with D.X., was later developed further. E.H., B.G. and M.D. carried out the experiments. B.G. and M.D. designed and built the EUV spectrometer. E.H. and B.G. performed the data analysis and performed simulations. D.X., C.H. and T.R. provided guidance on the experiments and on potential applications. E.H. and D.X. wrote the paper, with contributions from all other authors.

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Correspondence to E. Hemsing or D. Xiang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Hemsing, E., Dunning, M., Garcia, B. et al. Echo-enabled harmonics up to the 75th order from precisely tailored electron beams. Nature Photon 10, 512–515 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.101

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