Cyclotron harmonic emission in a Penning discharge

Microwave noise emission at the harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency from the magnetized plasma column of a Penning discharge is investigated experimentally. The harmonic emission spectrum is observed using oxygen gas in a variety of discharge configurations. It is found that grid stabilization of the plasma column has very little effect on the emission spectrum. Measurements of the shape and location of the harmonic emission lines are described in detail. On the basis of a microwave interferometer measurement of the electron density, it is concluded that the existence of a hybrid layer somewhere on the plasma column is a necessary condition for the observation of harmonic emission. The relaxation time and the cathode voltage dependence of the harmonic emission are investigated using a pulse modulation technique. It is found that the emission intensity increases rapidly with the magnitude of the cathode voltage and that the relaxation time decreases with increasing neutral gas pressure. High intensity nonharmonic radiation is observed and identified as resulting from a beam-plasma wave instability thereby eliminating the same instability as a possible source of the harmonic emission. It is found that the collective experimental results are in reasonable agreement with the single particle electrostatic radiation theory of Canobbio and Croci.

Splitting of femtosecond laser pulses by using a Dammann grating and compensation gratings

When a Dammann grating is used to split a beam of femtosecond laser pulses into multiple equal-intensity beams, chromatic dispersion will occur in beams of each order of diffraction and with different scale of angular dispersion because the incident ultrashort pulse contains a broad range of spectral bandwidths. We propose a novel method in which the angular dispersion can be compensated by positioning an m-time-density grating to collimate the mth-order beam that has been split, producing an array of beams that are free of angular dispersion. The increased width of the compensated output pulses and the spectral walk-off effect are discussed. We have verified this approach theoretically and validated it through experiments. It should be highly interesting in practical applications of splitting femtosecond laser pulses for pulse-width measurement, pump-probe measurement, and micromachining at multiple points. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.