Multilayer coating lab

This lab is built to provide MAP researchers with special dedicated research optics, which are commercially not available. These specially developed optics components (mirrors, beam splitters, spectral filters, polarizers, diffraction optics) serve as key components in ultrafast laser experiments ranging from few-cycle femtosecond laser pulses to attosecond XUV pulses.

Besides ultrathin metal filters and metal mirrors a large variety of dispersive (chirped) optics have been developed in the MAP service centre, covering the whole spectral range from infrared (IR) over visible (VIS) up to ultraviolet (UV) and even to the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), and are available now for several MAP projects: broadband optics, very low losses and high-damage threshold optics and optics with accurately optimized dispersion both in magnitude shape and sign.

Chirped multilayer mirrors for the vis-IR spectral range are key elements for the realization of single (few)-cycle optical pulses with < 4 fsec duration and are used in various MAP projects. The idea of chirped dispersive multilayer coated mirrors for the optical range has been first published by the now deputy director of MAP, Prof. F. Krausz [1], and are furtherly developed and fabricated in his group at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Even shorter light pulses can be realized in the Extreme Ultraviolet and Soft X-ray spectral range, where the shortest electromagnetic single pulses have recently been generated at around 100 eV photon energy [2]. These experiments are based on high harmonic generation in rare gas atoms initiated by carrier envelope phase stabilized few cycle laser pulses.
The continuous part of the high harmonic spectrum building the attosecond pulse is filtered by customized ultrathin metallic foils and nanometer multilayer soft x-ray optics with controlled frequency amplitude and phase.
These attosecond XUV optics is developed in the group for atomic and X-ray physics at the LMU Munich (Prof. U. Kleineberg). Based on very short light- and XUV pulses, researchers of MAP study fast electronic processes in nature or artificial devices.

1) R. Szipöcs, K. Ferencz, C. Spielmann, and F. Krausz, “Chirped multilayer coatings for broadband dispersion control in femtosecond lasers,” Opt. Lett. 19 201 (1994). 
2) E.Goulielmakis et al., “Single-cycle nonlinear optics”, Science 320 1614 (2008)