Gigawatt-class, tabletop, isolated-attosecond-pulse light source

Abstract

Powerful and stable attosecond pulse sources have the potential for wide application in ultrafast science. For this purpose, we have produced a soft X-ray supercontinuum with a pulse energy of 0.24 µJ using high-order harmonics from a multi-terawatt, 10 Hz, three-channel waveform synthesizer [ Sci. Adv. 6 , eaay2802 ( 2020 ) STAMCV 1468-6996 10.1126/sciadv.aay2802 ]. Here, we report an attosecond streaking scheme that is designed to measure this isolated attosecond pulse at a low-repetition rate. We retrieved a pulse duration of 226 attoseconds (as), demonstrating the realization of 1.1 gigawatt isolated as pulses on a tabletop, which compares favorably to an X-ray free-electron laser in a large facility.