High-harmonic generation from plasma mirrors at kilohertz repetition rate.

We report the first demonstration of high-harmonic generation from plasma mirrors at a 1 kHz repetition rate. Harmonics up to nineteenth order are generated at peak intensities close to 10(18) W/cm(2) by focusing 1 mJ, 25 fs laser pulses down to 1.7 mu m FWHM spot size without any prior wavefront correction onto a moving target. We minimize target surface motion with respect to the laser focus using online interferometry to ensure reproducible interaction conditions for every shot and record data at 1 kHz with unprecedented statistics. This allows us to unambiguously identify coherent wake emission as the main generation mechanism. (c) 2011 Optical Society of America