Plasma mirror with few-cycle laser pulses

In this paper, the prepulses or the pedestal is intense enough to generate preplasma, which prevents the main pulse from interacting with a steep plasma. The plasma mirror is a promising technique for improving the pulse contrast. We used a Ti:Sa laser system providing 7 fs pulses with an energy of 400μJ on the target to generate and characterize the plasma mirror. The pulses are focused inside a vacuum chamber onto a glass target, which was rotated during the experiment and was replaced every two million shots. In conclusion we present an application-ready plasma mirror technique for few-cycle pulses, which improves the pulse contrast by two orders of magnitude and provides stable and well focusable pulses over an extended period of time (approx. one hour at 1 kHz pulse repetition rate).