Radiotherapy is a cornerstone of cancer management. The improvement of spatial dose distribution in the tumor volume by minimizing the dose deposited in the healthy tissues have been a major concern during the last decades. Temporal aspects of dose deposition are yet to be investigated. Laser-plasma-based particle accelerators are able to emit pulsed-proton beams at extremely high peak dose rates (~10 9 Gy/s) during several nanoseconds. The impact of such dose rates on resistant glioblastoma cell lines, SF763 and U87-MG, was compared to conventionally accelerated protons and X-rays. No difference was observed in DNA double-strand breaks generation and cells killing. The variation of the repetition rate of the proton bunches produced an oscillation of the radio-induced cell susceptibility in human colon carcinoma HCT116 cells, which appeared to be related to the presence of the PARP1 protein and an efficient parylation process. Interestingly, when laser-driven proton bunches were applied at 0.5 Hz, survival of the radioresistant HCT116 p53 −/− cells equaled that of its radiosensitive counterpart, HCT116 WT, which was also similar to cells treated with the PARP1 inhibitor Olaparib. Altogether, these results suggest that the application modality of ultrashort bunches of particles could provide a great therapeutic potential in radiotherapy.

The study of radiation biology on laser-based accelerators is most interesting due to the unique irradiation conditions they can produce, in terms of peak current and duration of the irradiation. In this paper we present the implementation of a beam transport system to transport and shape the proton beam generated by laser-target interaction for in vitro irradiation of biological samples. A set of four permanent magnet quadrupoles is used to transport and focus the beam, efficiently shaping the spectrum and providing a large and relatively uniform irradiation surface. Real time, absolutely calibrated, dosimetry is installed on the beam line, to enable shot-to-shot control of dose deposition in the irradiated volume. Preliminary results of cell sample irradiation are presented to validate the robustness of the full system.

Harmonic seeded operation of a neon-like titanium plasma-based soft x-ray laser is described. The plasma amplifier is pumped with a variation of the grazing incidence technique involving a fast and localized ionization step. We discuss its effect on gain dynamics by measuring the amplifying factor as a function of the delay between pump pulse and harmonic seed. Two different regimes are pointed out, following the pumping scheme used. For one of them, a delay in the gain generation compared with the pumping laser pulse is observed.

Seeded operation of a Neon-like Titanium plasma-based soft x-ray laser is described. The plasma amplifier is pumped using a variation of the classical grazing incidence pumping technique, combining a long low energy pulse followed by a main short pulse. Because the preformed plasma is underionized, a part of the main short pulse energy is used to ionized it to the lasing stage. Consequences of this feature on seeded laser properties are discussed.

Extreme ultra-violet (EUV) laboratory lasers can be used to probe energy transport in laser irradiated solid targets. We report on a recent experiment undertaken at LASERIX whereby the heating of laser-irradiated targets containing a thin layer of iron (50 nm) encased in plastic (CH) was diagnosed using EUV laser (13.9 nm) back-lighter probing. The heating laser pulse duration was 35fs with focal irradiances of \(3 \times 10^{16}\)Wcm\(^{-2}\) and a deliberate prepulse 20 ps before the main pulse at irradiances of \(3 \times 10^{15}\)Wcm\(^{-2}\). A one dimensional hydrodynamic fluid code HYADES has been used to simulate the temporal variation in EUV transmission using IMP opacity values for the iron layer and the simulated transmissions compared to measured transmission values. When a deliberate prepulse is used to preform an expanding plastic plasma, it is found that radiation heating is dominant in the heating of the iron layer giving rise to a rapid decrease in EUV opacity and an increase in the transmission of the 13.9nm laser radiation as the iron ionizes to Fe\(^{5+}\) and above.

We demonstrate the use of extreme ultra-violet (EUV) laboratory lasers in probing energy transport in laser irradiated solid targets. EUV transmission through targets containing a thin layer of iron (50 nm) encased in plastic (CH) after irradiation by a short pulse (35 fs) laser focussed to irradiances 3 × 1016 Wcm−2 is measured. Heating of the iron layer gives rise to a rapid decrease in EUV opacity and an increase in the transmission of the 13.9 nm laser radiation as the iron ionizes to Fe5+ and above where the ion ionisation energy is greater than the EUV probe photon energy (89 eV). A one dimensional hydrodynamic fluid code HYADES has been used to simulate the temporal variation in EUV transmission (wavelength 13.9 nm) using IMP opacity values for the iron layer and the simulated transmissions are compared to measured transmission values. When a deliberate pre-pulse is used to preform an expanding plastic plasma, it is found that radiation is important in the heating of the iron layer while for pre-pulse free irradiation, radiation transport is not significant.

The influence of temporal pump laser profile on the Soft X-ray laser (SXRL) efficiency is investigated in double grazing incidence pumping (DGRIP) transient collisional scheme. We have demonstrated a simple method that allows to produce and control one or several small prepulses and the ASE level of the pump laser beam by modifying the regenerative amplifier parameters. By changing the temporal structure of the pump beam we observed both an increase of the SXRL energy and an improvement of the target lifetime. Measurements made for different configurations are presented and discussed.

We have investigated the high harmonic generation driven by two quasi-collinear IR pulses separated by picosecond delay. Experiments were performed at the LASERIX facility using 50 fs pulses at 800 nm with energy up to 25 mJ. We have studied the generation of two high harmonic pulses from the same medium. In particular, we show how the ratio in energy of each pulse can be used to balance the perturbation induced by the first pulse in the generating gas.

The LASERIX facility has restarted operation in the middle of the year 2010. Since then, important work has been achieved on the XUV sources performance, reliability and stability, which lead to the construction of two beamlines. The first one is based on transient collisional soft X-ray laser. In the second one, the high order harmonic generation process is used to convert infrared laser into coherent XUV radiations. Characteristics and some recent works on both of them will be presented. Besides, a complete setup for pump-probe experiments has been developed and successfully tested. Some examples involving this device and dealing with plasma opacity, radiobiology and nanomagnetism will be presented. We will conclude this paper by a discussion on how application experiments can be turned into valuable diagnostics for XUV sources.

We present in this paper a laser-driven coherent EUV beamline resulting from the combination of a versatile high-order laser harmonic generator with a robust plasma-based EUV laser amplifier. Both devices can be used separetely or in synergy. Seeding of the plasma amplifier by a high-order harmonic beam leads to a strong improvement of the EUV laser beam divergence and uniformity. Moreover the system can be turned easily into a IR pump-XUV probe setup for plasma opacity probing. The possibility to generate two separate harmonic sources from the same gas cell offers the opportunity to explore EUV pump -EUV probe experiments.

The potential for coherent extreme ultra-violet (EUV) light in probing laser-produced plasmas is investigated. New results are presented to demonstrate that EUV radiation can be employed to measure heat penetration into solid targets from electrons using the signature of a change of opacity due to heating. We examine, in particular, the effects of hot electron heating of targets. In addition, phase variations after transmission through a laser-irradiated target change the subsequent propagation of the radiation, suggesting a simple diagnostic measuring the far-field footprint of coherent EUV radiation can be a useful measurement of the uniformity of target heating.

The accurate characterization of thermal electron transport and the determination of heating by suprathermal electrons in laser driven solid targets are both issues of great importance to the current experiments being performed at the National Ignition Facility, which aims to achieve thermonuclear fusion ignition using lasers. Ionization, induced by electronic heat conduction, can cause the opacity of a material to drop significantly once bound-free photoionization is no longer energetically possible. We show that this drop in opacity enables measurements of the transmission of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) laser pulses at 13.9 nm to act as a signature of the heating of thin (50 nm) iron layers with a 50-nm thick parylene-N (CH) overlay irradiated by 35-fs pulses at irradiance 3×10(16) Wcm(-2). Comparing EUV transmission measurements at different times after irradiation to fluid code simulations shows that the target is instantaneously heated by hot electrons (with approximately 10% of the laser energy), followed by thermal conduction with a flux limiter of ≈0.05.