Atomic inner-shell X-ray laser at 1.46 nanometres pumped by an X-ray free-electron laser
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- 25 January 2012
- journal article
- letter
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 481 (7382), 488-491
- https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10721
Abstract
Since the invention of the laser more than 50 years ago, scientists have striven to achieve amplification on atomic transitions of increasingly shorter wavelength1,2,3,4,5,6,7. The introduction of X-ray free-electron lasers8,9,10 makes it possible to pump new atomic X-ray lasers11,12,13 with ultrashort pulse duration, extreme spectral brightness and full temporal coherence. Here we describe the implementation of an X-ray laser in the kiloelectronvolt energy regime, based on atomic population inversion and driven by rapid K-shell photo-ionization using pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser. We established a population inversion of the Kα transition in singly ionized neon14 at 1.46 nanometres (corresponding to a photon energy of 849 electronvolts) in an elongated plasma column created by irradiation of a gas medium. We observed strong amplified spontaneous emission from the end of the excited plasma. This resulted in femtosecond-duration, high-intensity X-ray pulses of much shorter wavelength and greater brilliance than achieved with previous atomic X-ray lasers. Moreover, this scheme provides greatly increased wavelength stability, monochromaticity and improved temporal coherence by comparison with present-day X-ray free-electron lasers. The atomic X-ray lasers realized here may be useful for high-resolution spectroscopy and nonlinear X-ray studies.Keywords
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