Characteristics of focused soft X-ray free-electron laser beam determined by ablation of organic molecular solids

A linear accelerator based source of coherent radiation, FLASH (Free-electron LASer in Hamburg) provides ultra-intense femtosecond radiation pulses at wavelengths from the extreme ultraviolet (XUV; lambda< 100nm) to the soft X-ray (SXR; lambda<30nm) spectral regions. 25-fs pulses of 32-nm FLASH radiation were used to determine the ablation parameters of PMMA - poly ( methyl methacrylate). Under these irradiation conditions the attenuation length and ablation threshold were found to be (56.9 +/- 7.5) nm and similar to 2 mJ center dot cm(-2), respectively. For a second wavelength of 21.7 nm, the PMMA ablation was utilized to image the transverse intensity distribution within the focused beam at mu m resolution by a method developed here. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America