Boosting AttosecoND pulse IntensiTy with plasma mirrOrs – BANDITO

We want to exploit the temporal compression and resulting intensity-boost of ultraintense laser waveforms upon reflection off plasma-mirrors. The great potential of these plasma-mirror sources has long been recognized and experimental support has accumulated, but an actual experimental demonstration and exploitation of a generated high-intensity attosecond pulse is still outstanding.

We want to address this challenge by building upon the unique relativistically-intense near-single-cycle laser system and kHz-laser-plasma interaction platform developed in the last years at LOA. We will design an appropriate refocusing optical setup, implement and characterize it, and finally demonstrate a refocused high-intensity attosecond pulse. We expect to surpass by orders of magnitude the intensity of current sub-femtosecond pulses with a visible-to-VUV attosecond field transient. After suppressing the lowest visible and UV frequencies to obtain a few-cycle VUV attosecond pulse, we still expect to reach the strong-field regime and match intensities reached otherwise only with much larger lower-repetition-rate beamlines or free-electron-lasers.

In parallel, we will develop a liquid-sheet target that could remove critical limitation encountered with solid targets, and enable our implemented intense-attosecond-pulse source to functioned at a kHz-repetition rate for an unlimited time. This would dramatically facilitate source optimization and characterization as well as application experiments downstream.

This research will far advance the experimental exploitation of plasma mirrors as high-intensity light sources. This will have impact on strong-field physics, nonlinear optics in the VUV range, and for the pursuit of nonlinear-QED a petawatt laser facilities.