Spatio-temporal characterization of attosecond pulses from plasma mirrors

Reaching light intensities above 1025 W cm−2 and up to the Schwinger limit of order 1029 W cm−2 would enable the testing of fundamental predictions of quantum electrodynamics. A

promising—yet challenging—approach to achieve such extreme fields consists in reflecting a high-power femtosecond laser pulse off a curved relativistic mirror. This enhances the intensity of

the reflected beam by simultaneously compressing it in time down to the attosecond range, and focusing it to submicrometre focal spots. Here we show that such curved relativistic mirrors

can be produced when an ultra-intense laser pulse ionizes a solid target and creates a dense plasma that specularly reflects the incident light. This is evidenced by measuring the temporal

and spatial effects induced on the reflected beam by this so-called plasma mirror. The all-optical measurement technique demonstrated here will be instrumental for the use of relativistic

plasma mirrors with the upcoming generation of petawatt lasers that recently reached intensities of 5 × 1022 W cm−2, and therefore constitutes a viable experimental path to the Schwinger

limit.

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

We thank F. Réau, C. Pothier and D. Garzella for operating the UHI100 laser. The research received financial support from the European Research Council, LASERLAB-EUROPE and CREMLINplus

(grants 694596, 871124 and 871072, European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme), from Investissements d’Avenir LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM) and from Agence Nationale

de la Recherche (ANR-18-ERC2-0002). An award of computer time was provided by the INCITE programme (project ‘PlasmInSilico’). This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing

Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Cross-Disciplinary Program on Numerical

Simulation of CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux énergies alternatives).

Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, CNRS, LIDYL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Ludovic Chopineau, Adrien Denoeud, Philippe Martin, Henri Vincenti & Fabien Quéré

Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée, ENSTA-Paristech, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

The School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Applied Physics Department, Soreq Nuclear Research Center, Yavne, Israel

F.Q. conceived the experiment, and F.Q. and A.D. conceived the experimental set-up. A.D. and L.C. performed the experiment with the help of E.P. The data analysis was carried out by L.C.

with the help of A.L. H.V. performed all numerical simulations. F.Q. was in charge of the manuscript, to which all authors contributed.

Peer review information Nature Physics thanks Zhengming Sheng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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