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Updated: Dec 27, 2025

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Inferred UV fluence focal-spot profiles from soft x-ray pinhole-camera measurements on OMEGA
W Theobald1, C Sorce1, W R Donaldson1
1Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14623-1299, USA.
Abstract:
A method was developed with laser-irradiated Au planar foils to characterize the focal spot of UV laser beams on a target at full energy from soft x-ray emission. A pinhole camera with a back-thinned charge-coupled device detector and filtration with thin Be and Al foil filters provides images of the x-ray emission at photon energies <2 keV. This method requires a careful measurement of the relationship between the applied UV fluence and the x-ray signal, which can be described by a power-law dependence. The measured exponent γ ∼ 2 provides a dynamic range of ∼25 for the inferred UV fluence. UV fluence profiles of selected beams were measured for 100-ps and 1-ns laser pulses and were compared to directly measured profiles from an UV equivalent-target-plane diagnostic. The inferred spot size and super-Gaussian order from the x-ray technique agree within several percent with the values measured with the direct UV measurements.
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