Progress on laser driven x-ray sources at the Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée

The development of fast and ultra-fast high power laser systems has opened the path to the development of a large variety of short duration X-ray and XUV sources. Some of these sources, combining a short pulse duration (100 fs to few ps) and a reasonable amount of photons per pulse (from 108 to 1012), are now mature for application experiments in numerous fields including solid state physics, biology, atomic physics, hot dense plasma and chemistry.

In this present contribution we present some aspects of the laser-driven x-ray research perfomed at the Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée (France). We will concentrate on collisional soft x-ray lasers and x-ray radiation produced by plasma-produced relativistic electron beams.