High photon flux Kα Mo x-ray source driven by a multi-terawatt femtosecond laser at 100 Hz

Abstract

We develop a pulsed hard x-ray Kα source at 17.4 keV pro-duced by the interaction of a multi-terawatt peak power in-frared femtosecond laser pulse with a thick molybdenum(Mo) target at a 100 Hz repetition rate. We measure thehighest MoKαphoton production reported to date corre-sponding to a Kα photon flux of 1×10^11ph∕sr·s and an estimated peak brightness of∼2.5×10^17ph∕s·mm2·mrad2 0.1%bandwidth at ∼5×10^18W∕cm2 driving laser intensity