LUND HIGH-POWER LASER FACILITY - SYSTEMS AND 1ST RESULTS

A high-power laser facility has been established at the Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden, available to national groups and their international collaboration partners. The laboratory incorporates three major 10 Hz laser systems, that can be operated individually or synchronized in combined use. Each system represents extreme optical powers in a certain sense. The main system is a terawatt laser based on chirped pulse amplification in titanium doped sapphire. It generates radiation tunable in the 760-840 nm region with a maximum power of 1.5TW in 150 fs long pulses. A further system is set up to generate nanosecond pulses of extremely bright VUV radiation (down to 120 nm) by sum-difference four-wave mixing in krypton gas. Finally, a third system generates widely tunable radiation (200-900 nm) of a pulse duration of 10's of picoseconds. The experimental areas incorporate target chambers, spectrometers and fast electronics. The systems have been used in a number of experiments requiring high optical powers, and a brief account of the initial activities is given. Detailed studies of high-harmonic generation in inert gases are reported as well as the generation and application of hard X-rays from microplasmas. Intense white-light generation by self-phase modulation in water has been used for biological tissue studies and for chemical pump/probe experiments. VUV radiation has been used for studies of radiative properties of excited states of free atoms. Finally, the picosecond laser system has been utilized in studies of the temporal structure of harmonics from an inert gas and for soft X-ray generation for high-resolution microscopy. A discussion section concludes the presentation.