The continuous development and improvement of laser sources has steadily increased
the number of applications and pushed the limit of high precision measurements
in various fields. The goal of the work presented in this thesis is to improve the
spectrally broadened Ti:sapphire laser system used for isolated extreme ultraviolet
(XUV) pulse generation, which has, in the last decade, allowed the study of electron
dynamics on a sub-femtosecond (1 fs = 10^-15 s) level and delivered new insights into
ultrafast dynamics of electrons in atoms, molecules and solids.
By adding a second stage amplifier to the commonly used one-stage chirped pulse
amplification laser system the compressed output power of a sub-5 fs laser system
has been tripled to 1.5 mJ. A crucial part for achieving this result is the comparison
of two different efficient compressor setups in order to optimize the compression.
With these higher pulse energies, it is possible to increase the generated photon
ux
in an isolated attosecond (10^-18 s) pulse and to push the XUV photon energy higher.
Run at 4 kHz repetition rate, integrative measurements with sub-2 cycle laser pulses
can be conducted much faster than with most laser sources in this energy range.
The resulting pulses are used for high-harmonic generation (HHG) and characterized
via attosecond streaking, demonstrating excellent stability and quality of the
whole laser system.
First experiments with these pulses were conducted by probing the temporal behavior
of the photo-emission of the giant resonance of 4d electrons in xenon with broadband
XUV-pulses at 100 eV and inducing and measuring the nonlinear propagation
in fused silica at high intensities via its effect on the waveform of the ultra-short
visible-near-infrared pulse measured by means of attosecond streaking.
The higher pulse energy of the driving laser field will also prove to be very useful as
soon as nonlinear effects besides HHG contribute to the pump and probe setup e.g.
an ultrashort UV-pulse is used to pump electron dynamics which are subsequently
probed with high temporal resolution by the XUV-pulse.