LMU, Garching
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Recent breakthroughs in the field of laser-plasma electron accelerators have led to intrinsically ultrashort (supposedly ~5 fs rms) electron beams with energies on the GeV-scale. In these accelerators, a high-power laser beam is focussed into a gas target and excites a plasma wave, whose fields can accelerate electrons to ultrarelativistic energies over distances of only a few centimeters. Owing to their unprecedented features, these electron beams are suited for driving a next generation of ultrashort X-ray light sources. Both, spontaneous undulator light sources with femtosecond to attosecond pulse duration and, later, FEL-emission could be realized on a laboratory-sized scale. In this talk, we will present first experimental breakthroughs towards this end, manifesting itself in a laser-driven soft x-ray undulator source. We will also discuss a design for a first table-top FEL demonstration experiment.
