TUIXS : Tabletop Ultra Intense XUV Sources
for femto-biology and related applications
TUIXS is a FP6-NEST-Adventure funded project with Contract No.12843
The recent emergence of synchrotron-based XUV sources (FEL, 4th generation synchrotron) with intensities higher by more than 6 orders of magnitude compared to those of 3rd generation synchrotrons is opening a bright and exciting view on the X-ray Science. Impact on Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Nanoscience, and Astrophysics will be tremendous with certainly many unexpected new results.
Laser-based soft x-ray sources such as High harmonic generation or ASE (amplification of spontaneous emission) soft x-ray lasers have also achieved several impressive progresses in particular by reducing the pulse duration down to 100 as (1 as = 10-18s) in case of HHG. However, several bottlenecks slow down the achievement of ultra-intense soft x-ray sources pumped by laser. High harmonic generation produces pulses with energy around 1 µJ/pulse for a wavelength near 30 nm and about 0.1 µJ around 13 nm, while pulse duration of ASE soft x-ray lasers never goes below 2 ps.
In
2004 (Ph. Zeitoun et al, Nature...), the Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée
in collaboration with CEA, GoLP and LIXAM demonstrated that seeding a HHG
pulse in a low density laser-created plasma produced an amplification as strong
as 600 times without deterioration of the seed optical qualities. Although
this results clearly stated that seeding a soft x-ray laser generates unprecedented
soft x-ray beam, the race towards ultra-high intensities is still at its beginning.
TUIXS European project aims to achieve in three years a major leap in the construction of ultra-intense soft x-ray sources pumped by laser.
TUIXS is based on some groundbraking concepts :
- An amplification chain working in the soft x-ray wavelength range is feasible, incorporating the most advanced technologies developed for visible lasers.
- Soft x-ray wave front sensors adapted to ultra-intense beam and soft x-ray adaptive optics will be specially designed and tested on the amplifying chain.
- Plasma amplifiers based on the interaction of intense IR lasers with solid targets, have the potentiality to produce 0.1 to 1mJ beam having a pulse duration around 100 fs (and probably below) and a diffraction-limited wave front.
- Because amplification, without beam deterioration, of a soft x-ray seed in a high density plasma remains very challenging, our researches will be guided by high accuracy numerical experiments based on a well-controlled 2D, adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic code (ARWEN) coupled to a 3D ray-trace code (SHADOX 2.0) describing the soft x-ray beam propagation and amplification.
- At each step of progress, the seeded soft x-ray laser will be evaluated on experiments related to femtobiology field in particular the hard x-ray diffraction. Mechanisms such as the cluster explosion under very high soft x-ray intensities will be studied as well as flash holography...
TUIXS is a three year project gathering 7 groups (CEA,IST, LLC, LOA, PALS, UPM, UU) from 5 countries (Czech Republic, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden). Experts from plasma physics both experimentalists and numericians, soft x-ray sources (HHG and soft x-ray laser) and femtobiology are closely working each together to realize in a short timescale our dream of a Table-top Ultra-Intense, XUV Source.