Henry C. Kapteyn Ph.D. Thesis
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Photoionization-Pumped Short-Wavelength Lasers by Henry Cornelius Kapteyn Abstract The process of photoionization can create population inversions in highly-excited ions on transitions at short wavelengths. A laser-produced plasma can be used as a bright x-ray source to produce laser action on these transitions. This thesis discusses the first demonstration and the analysis of a new type of photoionization-pumped laser. In addition, future prospects for photoionization-pumped x-ray lasers are discussed. A review of proposed mechanisms for creating photoionization-pumped lasers is presented along with a review of the physics of x-ray lasers. Following this is a discussion of the first experimental demonstration of two short-wavelength lasers. The population inversions on these transitions, in xenon at 108.9 nm, and in krypton at 90.7 nm, are created by Auger decay following inner-shell photoionization. Gains of exp(7) for the xenon transition and exp(4.5) for the krypton transition were measured. The demonstration of these lasers depended on proper experimental design to limit the deleterious effects of amplified spontaneous emission on the systems. Modeling of the laser dynamics is in good agreement with experiment. Possible superradiance effects in the laser system were also observed. A novel experimental setup was used to measure the lifetimes of the relevant atomic levels. This setup used a Q-switched and mode-locked laser to create a high repetition rate plasma x-ray source. The technique of time-correlated photon counting was used to 1 measure the lifetimes of the upper and lower laser levels, with results of 4.75±0.15 and 20.5±2 nsec for xenon, and 2.0±0.1 and 4.5±0.3 nsec for krypton. Neutral-gas collisional quenching coefficients and fluorescence branching ratios were also measured. Finally, a scheme to create an x-ray laser on the K-a transitions of light atoms and molecules is developed. The population inversion would be created by an ultrafast laser plasma x-ray source. Simulations of this scheme for the case of neon gas with a transition wavelength of 1.46 nm show that a gain of exp(10) could be produced using an excitation pulse of 1-10 Joules in 50 fsec. A laser capable of producing these pulses is technologically feasible using the recently developed technique of chirped pulse amplification in conjunction with new laser materials such as titanium-doped sapphire. 2 Title page Photoionization-Pumped Short-Wavelength Lasers Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Physics by Henry Cornelius Kapteyn i Photoionization-Pumped Short-Wavelength Lasers Copyright © 1989 Henry Cornelius Kapteyn ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my Wife, my Mom, and my Dad, and my brother Robert, my sister Sanderina, my cats Femto and Miss Kitty, my vacations, my MAC IIx, microsoft word (especially the spelling checker), my new apartment, my VCR, my anticipated greater salary upon filing this theses, and my wife, and nice sunny beaches, and nice dark laboratories, and nice people, and nice restaurants, and my nice wife, and... finishing my thesis. iii For number sequence only. iv Acknowledgments Many people were of great help to me in the completion of my thesis work. Foremost among these were my fellow graduate student (and now my wife) Máiréad Murnane, and my thesis advisor Roger Falcone. Máiréad and I worked together on many of the early experiments, and many of the insights gained during the course of this work were the result of discussions with her. Roger was very involved as a thesis advisor, and I gained tremendously from his knowledge and insight. I seriously do not think I could have possibly learned more than I did, during the time I was his student. He's also a nice guy. Among the other people who have been of assistance are those at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who made many of these experiments possible. Richard W. Lee gave us invaluable support, advice, and encouragement for the experiments done at JANUS. The laser operators, James E. Swain and Paul Solone, did a great job of keeping the sometimes balky laser humming along. M.H. Chen, J.H. Scofield, and M.D. Rosen did various calculations for us as well. At Berkeley, several other students have played a part in this work. Jon Schachter wrote with me the CCD imaging software discussed in Appendix B. Jing Zhu and Bill Craig did some work with the streak camera as well. Undergraduates Jeff Schuster and Alan Berezin helped with some of the hardware used in the experiments. New graduate students Alan Sullivan and Harald Hamster are keeping the experimental program going. Among the faculty, I would like to thank my qualifying committee, Y.R. Shen, S.P. Davis, and C.K. Birdsall, and thesis committee members Y.R. Shen and C.B. Harris. Finally, I'd like to thank my mother Maria Kapteyn and my father Robert Kapteyn. They sacrificed far more than most parents, and far more than could be expected of any v parents, to give their children good educations. I wouldn't be writing this today if I had just an average set of parents. vi Table of Contents Title page....................................................................................................................i Abstract.......................................................................................................................1 Dedication...................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................v Table of Contents........................................................................................................vii List of Figures............................................................................................................xi List of Tables..............................................................................................................xxi Preface........................................................................................................................1 Introduction................................................................................................................3 Chapter 1: An Introduction to Short-Wavelength Lasers............................................5 1.1 The basic physics of stimulated emission.................................................6 1.2 Energy scaling for short-wavelength lasers...............................................14 1.3 A brief survey of short-wavelength laser schemes.....................................18 1.3.1 Photoionization-pumped laser schemes.....................................19 1.3.2 Other photon-pumped lasers......................................................33 1.3.3 Collisionally excited short-wavelength lasers.............................35 1.3.4 Recombination-pumped x-ray lasers..........................................40 vii 1.3.5 Miscellaneous other x-ray laser proposals.................................43 1.3.6 Conclusion.................................................................................44 Chapter 2: Auger-Decay-Pumped Short-Wavelength Lasers......................................45 2.1 Background..............................................................................................46 2.2 The gain demonstration experiment..........................................................48 2.3 Supporting work to the LLNL experiments..............................................65 2.3.1 Simple gain calculation code......................................................65 2.3.2 Other attempted experiments : a discussion of ASE effects.......70 2.3.3 Time dependent ASE model of the LLNL experiment...............82 2.3.4 Conclusion.................................................................................93 2.4 Fluorescence spectroscopy experiments...................................................94 2.4.1 Lifetime measurements using time-correlated photon counting....................................................................................................95 2.4.2 Fluorescence intensity measurements........................................113 2.4.3 Gain measurements with low-energy lasers...............................120 2.4.4 Conclusion.................................................................................123 Chapter 3: Photoionization-Pumped X-Ray Lasers.....................................................125 3.1 Future development of the xenon and krypton lasers................................125 3.2 Photoionization-pumped lasers at shorter wavelengths.............................127 viii 3.2.1 Other Auger lasers.....................................................................127 3.2.2 Direct photoionization-pumped schemes...................................129 3.3 X-ray lasers on K-a transitions................................................................131 3.3.1 General introduction..................................................................131 3.3.2 Simulation of a laser on the neon K-a transition.......................137 3.3.3 K-a lasers in molecules.............................................................158 3.3.4 X-ray lasers on L-shell transitions.............................................164 3.3.5 Conclusion.................................................................................165 3.4 Ultra-high power ultrashort-pulse lasers...................................................167 3.4.1 Titanium-doped sapphire...........................................................167