Toward an x-ray laser beamline facility : LASERIX

Future progress of x-ray lasers call for specific facilities intended to x-ray laser studies and development of a largevariety of x-ray laser applications. This paper presents LASERIX, a future x-ray laser facility under construction foroptimization of transient collisional excitation x-ray lasers, study of new x-ray laser schemes, and development ofapplications.Keywords: X-ray laser, collisional pumping, laser and discharge plasmas, Ti:sapphire lasers 1. INTRODUCTION X-ray lasers are studied since more than 30 years and the first demonstration was made almost 20 years ago 1 . Thesehugely bright sources in the XUV range, brighter by orders of magnitude with respect to other sources, are however notwidely spread and used for applications. Such situation is due mainly to the size of drivers for early x-ray lasers, whichwere used mainly for inertial confinement fusion studies and left very few shots for x-ray lasers.However the required driving energy for x-ray lasers has strongly decreased with transient pumping on one hand andcapillary discharge pumping on the other hand. Several x-ray laser facilities are presently operating or underconstruction, and will give opportunities to step up application experiments. LASERIX will be one of these newfacilities. It is intended to produce transient collisional x-ray lasers and to realize application experiments using theunique properties of these sources. In addition LASERIX will offer a large variety of laser pulses to study new schemesof x-ray lasers.