Advances in high repetition rate table-top soft x-ray lasers

We discuss recent advances in the development of high repetition rate table-soft soft x-ray lasers resulting from research conducted at Colorado State University. Advancing saturated table-top lasers to shorter wavelengths we report the operation of gain-saturated sub-10 nm table-top lasers at 1 Hz repetition rate. We also present experimental results that show that injection-seeding of solid-target soft x-ray plasma amplifiers reduces the far field divergence by an order of magnitude and to allow for control of the far-field beam characteristics by tailoring the divergence of the seed. We finally discuss progress towards the development of high repetition rate compact all-diode-pumped soft x-ray lasers. We have operated the front end of the diode-pumped soft-ray laser driver at 100Hz repetition rate, obtaining sub-5 ps optical laser pulses of 100 mJ energy.

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