0.5-keV Soft X-ray attosecond continua.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27167525.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms11493 and PMC identifier 4865833.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Attosecond light pulses in the extreme ultraviolet have drawn a great deal of attention due to their ability to interrogate electronic dynamics in real time. Nevertheless, to follow charge dynamics and excitations in materials, element selectivity is a prerequisite, which demands such pulses in the soft X-ray region, above 200 eV, to simultaneously cover several fundamental absorption edges of the constituents of the materials. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the exploitation of a transient phase matching regime to generate carrier envelope controlled soft X-ray supercontinua with pulse energies up to 2.9±0.1 pJ and a flux of (7.3±0.1) × 10(7) photons per second across the entire water window and attosecond pulses with 13 as transform limit. Our results herald attosecond science at the fundamental absorption edges of matter by bridging the gap between ultrafast temporal resolution and element specific probing.