Seeded x-ray free-electron laser generating radiation with laser statistical properties
Abstract
The invention of optical lasers led to a revolution in the field of optics and even to the creation of completely new fields of research such as quantum optics. The reason was their unique statistical and coherence properties. The newly emerging, short-wavelength free-electron lasers (FELs) are sources of very bright coherent extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) and x-ray radiation with pulse durations on the order of femtoseconds, and are presently considered to be laser sources at these energies. Most existing FELs are highly spatially coherent but in spite of their name, they behave statistically as chaotic sources. Here, we demonstrate experimentally, by combining Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometry with spectral measurements that the seeded XUV FERMI FEL-2 source does indeed behave statistically as a laser. The first steps have been taken towards exploiting the first-order coherence of FELs, and the present work opens the way to quantum optics experiments that strongly rely on high-order statistical properties of the radiation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.08177,
title = {Seeded x-ray free-electron laser generating radiation with laser statistical properties},
author = {O. Yu. Gorobtsov and G. Mercurio and F. Capotondi and P. Skopintsev and S. Lazarev and I. A. Zaluzhnyy and M. Danailov and M. Dell`Angela and M. Manfredda and E. Pedersoli and L. Giannessi and M. Kiskinova and K. C. Prince and W. Wurth and I. A. Vartanyants},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.08177},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
24 pages, 10 figures, 37 references