Characteristics of a Ni-like silver x-ray laser pumped by a single profiled laser pulse

We characterized a Ni-like silver soft x-ray laser realized as, what we believe is, a new variant of the grazing incidence pumping (GRIP) scheme. The x-ray laser was pumped by a single profiled laser pulse from a 10 Hz Ti:sapphire laser system. The Ni-like Ag x-ray laser was saturated with a gain coefficient of 76 cm(-1) and an effective gain-length product of 28.2. The spatial characteristics of the new version of GRIP x-ray laser are presented including the far- and near-field beam profiles. Computational modeling of the lasing conditions was used to provide some qualitative explanations of the physical processes occurring in the x-ray laser. Additionally, we obtained some preliminary results on the injection seeding technique applied to the Ni-like Ag active medium using the 59th harmonic of the Ti:sapphire laser pulse as the seed. The single-pulse variant of the pumping scheme proved to be a stable and simple configuration of the table-top x-ray lasers also suitable for the injector-amplifier arrangement. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.