Source development of plasma-based soft X-ray laser and the applications for probing nano-scale dynamics of laser ablation

Kawachi, Tetsuya; Nishikino, Masaharu; Hasegawa, Noboru; Minami, Yasuo*; Baba, Motoyoshi*; Yamagiwa, Mitsuru; Kondo, Kiminori; Inogamov, N. A.*; Zakhovsky, V.*; Faenov, A. Y.*; Suemoto, Toru*

Short pulse X-ray sources become indispensable diagnostic tools in modern science and technology and are widely used in probing substances for new material development, protein crystallography in innovative drug development, and non-destructive X-ray imaging etc. The improvement of the sources is also important subject, and in particular coherent X-rays in both the laser-based and accelerator-based are intensively studied, which enable us to achieve quite high spatial-resolution as the probe and quite intense X-ray as the pump. Besides the laser-driven sources have potentials to downsizing and table-top systems, therefore we carry out the development of fully spatially coherent soft X-ray laser (SXRL) at the wavelength of 13.9 nm and its applications. The advantages of SXRLs are the large number of photons in coherent volume enough for shingle shot probe, which enable us to observe non-repetitive and irreversible phenomena, and this wavelength for which highly reflective optics are available.