Publisher Correction: Control of laser plasma accelerated electrons for light sources.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Introduction and incorrectly read 'A proper electron beam control is one of the main challenges towards the Graal of developing a compact alternative of X-ray free-electron lasers by coupling LWFA gigaelectron-volts per centimetre acceleration gradient with undulators in the amplification regime in equation 11, nx(n-ß) x ß: n the two times and beta the two times should be bold since they are vectorsin Eq. 12, ß should be bold as well.' The correct version is 'A proper electron beam control is one of the main challenges towards the Graal of developing a compact alternative of X-ray free-electron lasers by coupling LWFA gigaelectron-volts per centimetre acceleration gradient with undulators in the amplification regime.'This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Control of laser plasma accelerated electrons for light sources.

With gigaelectron-volts per centimetre energy gains and femtosecond electron beams, laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is a promising candidate for applications, such as ultrafast electron diffraction, multistaged colliders and radiation sources (betatron, compton, undulator, free electron laser). However, for some of these applications, the beam performance, for example, energy spread, divergence and shot-to-shot fluctuations, need a drastic improvement. Here, we show that, using a dedicated transport line, we can mitigate these initial weaknesses. We demonstrate that we can manipulate the beam longitudinal and transverse phase-space of the presently available LWFA beams. Indeed, we separately correct orbit mis-steerings and minimise dispersion thanks to specially designed variable strength quadrupoles, and select the useful energy range passing through a slit in a magnetic chicane. Therefore, this matched electron beam leads to the successful observation of undulator synchrotron radiation after an 8 m transport path. These results pave the way to applications demanding in terms of beam quality.

Two-Dimensional Frequency Resolved Optomolecular Gating of High-Order Harmonic Generation.

Probing electronic wave functions of polyatomic molecules is one of the major challenges in high-harmonic spectroscopy. The extremely nonlinear nature of the laser-molecule interaction couples the multiple degrees of freedom of the probed system. We combine two-dimensional control of the electron trajectories and vibrational control of the molecules to disentangle the two main steps in high-harmonic generation-ionization and recombination. We introduce a new measurement scheme, frequency-resolved optomolecular gating, which resolves the temporal amplitude and phase of the harmonic emission from excited molecules. Focusing on the study of vibrational motion in N_{2}O_{4}, we show that such advanced schemes provide a unique insight into the structural and dynamical properties of the underlying mechanism.

Partially coherent ultrafast spectrography.

Modern ultrafast metrology relies on the postulate that the pulse to be measured is fully coherent, that is, that it can be completely described by its spectrum and spectral phase. However, synthesizing fully coherent pulses is not always possible in practice, especially in the domain of emerging ultrashort X-ray sources where temporal metrology is strongly needed. Here we demonstrate how frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), the first and one of the most widespread techniques for pulse characterization, can be adapted to measure partially coherent pulses even down to the attosecond timescale. No modification of experimental apparatuses is required; only the processing of the measurement changes. To do so, we take our inspiration from other branches of physics where partial coherence is routinely dealt with, such as quantum optics and coherent diffractive imaging. This will have important and immediate applications, such as enabling the measurement of X-ray free-electron laser pulses despite timing jitter.

How to focus an attosecond pulse.

Attosecond experiments involving focusing of attosecond light pulses can suffer from a spread of the attosecond radiation both in space and time due to optical aberrations. We present a detailed numerical study of the distortions induced in the most common focusing geometries that make use of parabolic, spherical, toroidal and ellipsoidal mirrors. We deduce the consequences on the pulse duration and possible issues that could arise in applications of attosecond pulses. This should serve as a guideline for setting up attosecond focusing optics.

Duration of ultrashort pulses in the presence of spatio-temporal coupling.

We report on a simple method allowing one to decompose the duration of arbitrary ultrashort light pulses, potentially distorted by space-time coupling, into four elementary durations. Such a decomposition shows that, in linear optics, a spatio-temporal pulse can be stretched with respect to its Fourier limit by only three independent phenomena: nonlinear frequency dependence of the spectral phase over the whole spatial extent of the pulse, spectral amplitude inhomogeneities in space, and spectral phase inhomogeneities in space. We illustrate such a decomposition using numerical simulations of complex spatio-temporal femtosecond and attosecond pulses. Finally we show that the contribution of two of these three effects to the pulse duration is measurable without any spectral phase characterization.

Control of the attosecond synchronization of XUV radiation with phase-optimized mirrors.

We report on the advanced amplitude and phase control of attosecond radiation allowed by specifically-designed multilayer XUV mirrors. We first demonstrate that such mirrors can compensate for the intrinsic chirp of the attosecond emission over a large bandwidth of more than 20 eV. We then show that their combination with metallic foils introduces a third-order dispersion that is adjustable through the mirror's incidence angle. This results in a controllable beating allowing the radiation to be shaped from a single to a series of sub-100 as pulses.