Professor Simon Hooker

Abstract:

We investigate HHG in gas-filled PCFs with microjoule driving lasers. QPM is implemented for the first time, enhancing the flux at 30 eV by a factor of 60.

Abstract:

We demonstrate experimentally the resonant excitation of plasma waves by trains of laser pulses. We also take an important first step to achieving an energy recovery plasma accelerator by showing that a plasma wave can be damped by an out-of-resonance trailing laser pulse. The measured laser wakefields are found to be in excellent agreement with analytical and numerical models of wakefield excitation in the linear regime. Our results indicate a promising direction for achieving highly controlled, GeV-scale laser-plasma accelerators operating at multikilohertz repetition rates.

Abstract:

A blind variant of digital holographic microscopy is presented that removes the requirement for a well-characterized, highly divergent reference beam. This is achieved by adopting an off-axis recording geometry where a sequence of holograms is recorded as the reference is tilted, and an iter ative algorithm that estimates the amplitudes and phases of both beams while simultaneously enhancing the numerical aperture. Numerical simulations have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of this approach when applied to the coherent imaging problem.