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Ultra thin gold films having a thickness of 20-30 nm are favorable laser plasma targets for a soft x-ray microscopy, because the ultra thin films emit intense soft x-rays at the wavelength of water window region from the rear side with respect to the surface irradiated with short pulse laser. Using rear side emissions, the distance between the x-ray source and the specimens can be reduced so that the x-ray flux on specimens increases. In addition, the microscope system can be designed to be compact when the specimen holder and x-ray source are combined in one piece. In the present study, the biological specimen holder combined with a gold ultra thin film plasma target has been developed for a contact-type soft x-ray microscope. This x-ray microscope system needs not any x-ray optics such as a condenser and/or an objective optics which causes a decrease in x-ray photons for imaging. Specimen holder equipped with the plasma target keeps biological specimens at wet condition in vacuum. In this study, x-ray images of hydrated living cells (MH-S mouse alveolar macrophage cell line) have been obtained successfully by use of the newly developed specimen holder. These experimental results reveal that the soft x-ray image can be taken safely. Specimen holder combined with plasma x-ray source will be a key component of a compact soft x-ray microscope using in a laboratory.

We have developed a soft x-ray laser (SXRL) interferometer capable of the single-shot imaging of nano-scaled structure dynamics. The interferometer consisted of the reflection optics including double Lloyd's mirrors and focusing optics, and the interference fringes are produced on the detector surface. The depth and lateral resolutions of the interferometer were about 1 nm and 1.8 m, respectively. By using this interferometer, the initial stage (~50 ps) of the ablation process of the Pt surface pumped by a 70 fs Ti:Sapphire laser pulse was observed. The expansion speed of the surface estimated from the result (34 nm/50 ps) indicated that the nano-bubble structures were formed in the initial stage of the ablation. In order to observe the detailed dynamics, the temporal synchronization between the pump and probe pulses was improved to be 3 ps by adopting a portion of the SXRL and pump beams as the time fiducials, to which the pump and probe timing was adjusted by using the x-ray streak camera.

Using the x-ray lasers as amplifiers of ultrashort x-ray pulses has been investigated as a scheme for ultimate light sources. For successful implementation, the characteristics of the scheme should be taken into account in designing the amplifiers. In this paper, the basic physics and characteristics of the scheme were analyzed by using the Maxwell-Bloch equations incorporating time-dependent gain, random spontaneous emission, atomic level degeneracy, and radiation polarization. The variation of the pulse parameters such as energy, bandwidth, pulsewidth, and polarization were explained based on a simple mechanism of pulse growth and also compared to that in the conventional x-ray lasers. These results should be the basic information for a practical implementation of the scheme.