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Spatio-temporal characterization of attosecond pulses from plasma mirrors

Nature Physics volume 17, pages 968–973 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Reaching light intensities above 1025 W cm−2 and up to the Schwinger limit of order 1029 W cm−2 would enable the testing of fundamental predictions of quantum electrodynamics. A promising—yet challenging—approach to achieve such extreme fields consists in reflecting a high-power femtosecond laser pulse off a curved relativistic mirror. This enhances the intensity of the reflected beam by simultaneously compressing it in time down to the attosecond range, and focusing it to submicrometre focal spots. Here we show that such curved relativistic mirrors can be produced when an ultra-intense laser pulse ionizes a solid target and creates a dense plasma that specularly reflects the incident light. This is evidenced by measuring the temporal and spatial effects induced on the reflected beam by this so-called plasma mirror. The all-optical measurement technique demonstrated here will be instrumental for the use of relativistic plasma mirrors with the upcoming generation of petawatt lasers that recently reached intensities of 5 × 1022 W cm−2, and therefore constitutes a viable experimental path to the Schwinger limit.

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Fig. 1: Principle of dynamical ptychography.
Fig. 2: Applications of dynamical ptychography to attosecond pulses generated on plasma mirrors.
Fig. 3: Temporal reconstruction of attosecond pulses from plasma mirrors.
Fig. 4: Spatio-temporal field of an attosecond pulse produced by a relativistic plasma mirror.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Réau, C. Pothier and D. Garzella for operating the UHI100 laser. The research received financial support from the European Research Council, LASERLAB-EUROPE and CREMLINplus (grants 694596, 871124 and 871072, European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme), from Investissements d’Avenir LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM) and from Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-18-ERC2-0002). An award of computer time was provided by the INCITE programme (project ‘PlasmInSilico’). This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Cross-Disciplinary Program on Numerical Simulation of CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux énergies alternatives).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, CNRS, LIDYL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Ludovic Chopineau, Adrien Denoeud, Philippe Martin, Henri Vincenti & Fabien Quéré

  2. Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée, ENSTA-Paristech, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Adrien Leblanc

  3. The School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Elkana Porat

  4. Applied Physics Department, Soreq Nuclear Research Center, Yavne, Israel

    Elkana Porat

Authors
  1. Ludovic Chopineau
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  5. Philippe Martin
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Contributions

F.Q. conceived the experiment, and F.Q. and A.D. conceived the experimental set-up. A.D. and L.C. performed the experiment with the help of E.P. The data analysis was carried out by L.C. with the help of A.L. H.V. performed all numerical simulations. F.Q. was in charge of the manuscript, to which all authors contributed.

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Correspondence to Henri Vincenti or Fabien Quéré.

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Peer review information Nature Physics thanks Zhengming Sheng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–4 and Figs. 1–6.

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Chopineau, L., Denoeud, A., Leblanc, A. et al. Spatio-temporal characterization of attosecond pulses from plasma mirrors. Nat. Phys. 17, 968–973 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01253-9

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