Electron Trapping from Interactions between Laser-Driven Relativistic Plasma Waves.

Interactions of large-amplitude relativistic plasma waves were investigated experimentally by propagating two synchronized ultraintense femtosecond laser pulses in plasma at oblique crossing angles to each other. The electrostatic and electromagnetic fields of the colliding waves acted to preaccelerate and trap electrons via previously predicted, but untested injection mechanisms of ponderomotive drift and wake-wake interference. High-quality energetic electron beams were produced, also revealing valuable new information about plasma-wave dynamics.

Wavefront-correction for nearly diffraction-limited focusing of dual-color laser beams to high intensities.

We demonstrate wavefront correction of terawatt-peak-power laser beams at two distinct and well-separated wavelengths. Simultaneous near diffraction-limited focusability is achieved for both the fundamental (800 nm) and second harmonic (400 nm) of Ti:sapphire-amplified laser light. By comparing the relative effectiveness of various correction loops, the optimal ones are found.

Generation of 9 MeV γ-rays by all-laser-driven Compton scattering with second-harmonic laser light.

Gamma-ray photons with energy >9  MeV were produced when second-harmonic-generated laser light (3 eV) inverse-Compton-scattered from a counterpropagating relativistic (~450  MeV) laser-wakefield-accelerated electron beam. Two laser pulses from the same laser system were used: one to accelerate electrons and one to scatter. Since the two pulses play very different roles in the γ-ray generation process, and thus have different requirements, a novel laser system was developed.

Adaptive-feedback spectral-phase control for interactions with transform-limited ultrashort high-power laser pulses.

Fourier-transform-limited light pulses were obtained at the laser-plasma interaction point of a 100-TW peak-power laser in vacuum. The spectral-phase distortion induced by the dispersion mismatching between the stretcher, compressor, and dispersive materials was fully compensated for by means of an adaptive closed-loop. The coherent temporal contrast on the sub-picosecond time scale was two orders of magnitude higher than that without adaptive control.

Attosecond time-resolved autoionization of argon.

Autoionization of argon atoms was studied experimentally by transient absorption spectroscopy with isolated attosecond pulses. The peak position, intensity, linewidth, and shape of the 3s3p⁶np ¹P Fano resonance series (26.6-29.

Delay control in attosecond pump-probe experiments.

The time delay between the pump and probe pulses in attosecond time-resolved experiments, such as attosecond streaking, is commonly introduced by splitting and recombining the two pulses in an interferometer. This technique suffers from instability in the optical path lengths of the two arms due to mechanical vibration of the optical elements and fluctuating environmental conditions. We present a technique with which the instability of the unconventional interferometer is suppressed while at the same time the time delay is controlled to within 20 as RMS using a feedback loop.

Extreme ultraviolet supercontinua supporting pulse durations of less than one atomic unit of time.

Double optical gating of high-harmonic generation was used to obtain supercontinuous spectra in the extreme UV (XUV) region including the water window. The spectra supported a 16 as pulse duration that is below one atomic unit of time (24 as). The dependence of the gated spectra on the carrier-envelope phase of the laser provided evidence that isolated attosecond pulses were generated.

Carrier-envelope phase stabilization and control of 1 kHz, 6 mJ, 30 fs laser pulses from a Ti:sapphire regenerative amplifier.

Carrier-envelope (CE) phase stabilization of a two-stage chirped pulse amplifier laser system with regenerative amplification as the preamplifier is demonstrated. The CE phase stability of this laser system is found to have a 90 mrad rms error averaged over 50 laser shots for a locking period of 4.5 h.

Summarizing Documents by Measuring the Importance of a Subset of Vertices within a Graph.

This paper presents a novel method of generating extractive summaries for multiple documents. Given a cluster of documents, we firstly construct a graph where each vertex represents a sentence and edges are created according to the asymmetric relationship between sentences. Then we develop a method to measure the importance of a subset of vertices by adding a super-vertex into the original graph.

Temperature feedback control for long-term carrier-envelope phase locking.

We report a double feedback loop for the improvement of the carrier-envelope phase stabilization of a chirped mirror based femtosecond laser oscillator. By combining the control of the Ti:sapphire crystal temperature and the modulation of the pump power, the carrier envelope offset frequency, fCEO, was locked for close to 20 h, which is much longer than the typical phase stabilization time with only pump power modulation.