LOA Signs €152K Contract for Hungarian Attosecond Project

Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée (LOA) in Palaiseau, France, has signed a €152,000 (about $173,000) contract to design, assemble and test an attosecond light source for a future research center in Hungary.

The agreement is part of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) project, which will be open to the international research community. The Szeged facility is expected to lead to results not only in the field of ultrafast physical processes but also in biological, medical and materials sciences.

Under the contract, LOA will develop a secondary light source for surface high-order harmonic generation to be installed by 2018.

From left, Dr. Stefan Haessler of Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée, and Dr. Viktória Tölgyesi and Dr. Károly Osvay, both of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source project. Courtesy of ELI-ALPS.

"The beamline … relies on attosecond pulse generation from dense plasmas created by the intense laser pulse on solid surfaces," said Dr. Katalin Varjú, head of the center's Secondary Sources Infrastructure Division. "This beamline should provide users of the ELI-ALPS facility with intense, single-attosecond pulses and different auxiliary pulses to perform pump-probe experiments with attosecond time synchronization."

LOA develops plasma-mirror-based attosecond pulse sources with kilohertz repetition rates for the study of laser-plasma interaction and generating attosecond pulses.