Doctoral Seminar: Tom Böttcher

I will present an experimental method for observing the plasma dynamics in laser-excited thin 30 nm gold foils using single-shot pump-probe coherent diffractive imaging. Our targets are  excited by a focused femtosecond (fs)-800 nm pump pulse. The excited foil is imaged by a low intensity fs-400 nm pulse with variable time delay from 50 fs to 2 ns. From the diffraction patterns of the probe pulse for different time delays the 2D-spatial resolved complex transmission is reconstructed by a phase retrieval algorithm, giving access to the ultrafast excitation (fs-ps regime) as well as the melting and ablation (ps-ns regime) dynamics.

Abstract