Speaker:
Agostino Marinelli, SLAC
Program Description
Time-resolved experiments at the attosecond scale hold great promise for understanding ultrafast electron dynamics in molecules, as well as the role of electron coherence in chemistry.
In the recent past, much progress has been made in using X-ray free-electron lasers (X-FELs) to visualize atomic motion at the tens of femtosecond scale. At the same time, table-top lasers have been operated at the attosecond scale and successfully employed in scientific experiments.
However, the femtosecond barrier has not yet been broken at X-ray free-electron lasers, hindering our ability to understand the fundamental motion of electrons.
In my talk I will describe the XLEAP project, aimed at generating attosecond pulses in the soft-X-ray region at LCLS. I will discuss the physics of laser-enhanced FELs and the effect of bandwidth broadening and self-compression in this FEL mode. Finally I will describe our plans for the transition from FEL R&D to science and discuss the roadmap to attosecond science with LCLS-II.
