The interval has been measured in the muonium atom by Doppler-free two-photon pulsed laser spectroscopy. The frequency separation of the states was determined to be 2 455 528 941.0(9.8) MHz, in good agreement with quantum electrodynamics. The result may be interpreted as a measurement of the muon-electron charge ratio as . We expect significantly higher accuracy at future high flux muon sources and from cw laser technology.
The muon is an elementary particle and, as such, forms a fundamental building block of the Standard Model of elementary particles. At the same time, the muon, especially the positively charged muon, when implanted in matter has established itself as a magnetic spin microprobe and hydrogen-like probe to study a variety of static and dynamic phenomena in superconductivity, magnetism, radical chemistry, semiconductor physics and many other fields. The limitation of this technique has been up until recently that it is restricted to investigation of bulk properties, because muons are generated from pion decay as high-energy particles with a broad stopping depth profile. This article describes recent developments of so-called ‘slow muon’ beams, where the energy is reduced down to the electronvolt to kiloelectronvolt range, thus making the probe depth sensitive on the nanometre scale. Some recent applications of this novel probe are described, such as the measurement of magnetic field profiles at the surface of superconductors and the measurement of the spatial variation in the polarization of conduction electrons in magnetic/non-magnetic multilayers. The generation of slow negative muons and possible applications of low-energy muons in the design of future muon colliders and neutrino sources are also briefly discussed.
We report on a broadband OPCPA system, pumped at 515 nm by frequency doubled Yb:YAG thin disk lasers. The system delivers 11.3 mJ pulses at a central wavelength of 800 nm with a spatial beam quality of M2 = 1.25 and > 25% pump-to-signal conversion efficiency. The broadband pulses were demonstrated to be compressible to 12 fs using a chirped mirror compressor.
1 January 2008 in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms
We report on a frequency-doubled picosecond Yb:YAG thin disk regenerative amplifier, developed as a pump laser for a kilohertz repetition rate OPCPA. At a repetition rate of 1 kHz, the compressed output of the regenerative amplifier has a pulse duration of 1.2 ps and pulse energy of 90 mJ with energy stability of σ < 0.8% and M2 < 1.2. The pulses are frequency doubled in an LBO crystal yielding 42 mJ at 515 nm.
We present a stable supercontinuum (SC) generated in a bulk YAG crystal, pumped by 3 ps chirped pulses at 1030 nm. The SC is generated in a loose focus geometry in a 13 cm long YAG crystal, allowing for stable and robust single-filament generation. The SC energy stability exceeds that of the pump laser by almost a factor of 3. Additionally, we show that the SC spectrum has long-term stability and that the SC is coherent and compressible by compressing the portions of SC spectra close to the corresponding Fourier limit. This makes the picosecond-pulse-driven SC a suitable stable seed for OPCPA amplifiers.