Abstract
The extreme intensities now delivered by femtosecond lasers make it possible to drive and control relativistic motion of charged particles with light1, opening a path to compact particle accelerators2,3 and coherent X-ray sources4,5. Accurately characterizing the dynamics of ultrahigh-intensity laser–plasma interactions as well as the resulting light and particle emissions is an essential step towards such achievements. This remains a considerable challenge, as the relevant scales typically range from picoseconds to attoseconds in time, and from micrometres to nanometres in space. In these experiments, owing to the extreme prevalent physical conditions, measurements can be performed only at macroscopic distances from the targets, yielding only partial information at these microscopic scales. This letter presents a major advance by applying the concepts of ptychography6,7 to such measurements, and thus retrieving microscopic information hardly accessible until now. This paves the way to a general approach for the metrology of extreme laser–plasma interactions on very small spatial and temporal scales.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to P. d’Oliveira, F. Réau, C. Pothier and D. Garzella for operating the UHI100 laser source. The research leading to these results has received financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Grant Agreement number 240013), from Investissements dAvenir LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM) through the ‘Ptychograt’ grant, from Agence Nationale pour la Recherche through grant ANR-14-CE32-0011, from OSEO through SAPHIR (contact number I0901001W), and from LASERLAB-EUROPE (grant agreement no. 284464, EC’s Seventh Framework Programme) through the INREX Joint Research Action.
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F.Q. proposed the idea of the measurement scheme. S.M., A.L., S.K. and F.Q. conceived the experimental set-up. The experiment was carried out by A.L. and S.M. with the help of S.K. A.L. processed the experimental data, C.B.-B. wrote the phase-retrieval program, A.L. and C.B.-B. worked together on the application of this program to the experimental results. The overall work was supervised by F.Q.
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Leblanc, A., Monchocé, S., Bourassin-Bouchet, C. et al. Ptychographic measurements of ultrahigh-intensity laser–plasma interactions. Nature Phys 12, 301–305 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3596
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3596
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