Theses

The non-destructive, non-reactive monitoring of particle beams in the nA range is one of the challenges in the accelerator technology. One way of achieving this objective is the detection of the azimuthal magnetic field created by the particle beam. In the present work a detection system was optimized in terms of noise limited resolution which is based on the principle of the Cryogenic Current Comparator (CCC). In the case of the CCC, the measurement of the magnetic field is realized with a superconducting pick-up coil and a superconductor current sensor (DC-SQUID), which are surrounded by a superconducting shield. It can be shown that the noise-limited resolution of the detector is determined primarily by the low-temperature properties of the pick-up coil and therewith the ferromagnetic core material used in the coil. To this end, extensive temperature and frequency-dependent studies on amorphous and nanocrystalline core materials with respect to their permeability and their noise contribution were carried out. Based on the results obtained an optimized cryogenic current comparator was set up, its noise-limited resolution was significantly reduced compared to previous models already tested.

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For many experiments at accelerator facilities high luminosities are necessary, which are only achievable with highest ion beam intensities. Some of the experiments planned for the FAIR project need beam intensities up to a few 10^11 heavy ions in order to observe effects having extremely low reaction cross-sections. Furthermore, applications like the ion-driven fusion require high-intensity beams with beam currents up to 200 Ampere in total. Low charged particles have to be used, because space charge effects limit the maximum expected intensity and phase space volume of the ion beams. However, in typical beam energy regimes above 1 MeV/u, these particles are far from their equilibrium state, resulting in charge changing events during interactions with the residual gas of the accelerator tubes occurring more frequently. In ring accelerators these effects lead to the loss of ions, which for high intensities and high repetition-rates can result in dynamic processes leading to a sudden loss of the whole beam. To minimize the impact of such charge changing effects, a good understanding and characterization of the underlying processes is crucial. The theoretical description of dynamical processes in many electron systems is challenging and can only be done in an approximate way. Therefore an experimental validation of the theoretical predications within a broad parameter range is needed. For this purpose, beam lifetime experiments with two typical uranium charge states, namely U^28+ and U^73+, at three beam energies (30,50 and 150 MeV/u) have been carried out at the ESR storage-ring of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, to determine their ionization cross-section in interactions with several different target gases.

The zero-point energy of the quantum electrodynamical vacuum manifests itself through the existence of virtual electron-positron fluctuations. Real electromagnetic fields now have the ability to couple to these fluctuations, and the quantum vacuum hence facilitates a variety of nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields. The present work aims at introducing and investigating the effect of quantum reflection as a new means of probing the quantum vacuum nonlinearity. The term quantum reflection is commonly employed to describe the reflection of atoms, quantum mechanically regarded as matter waves, from attractive potentials. This effect can be used to investigate the surface of condensed matter by shining probe particles onto it at grazing incident angles. The reflected particles are then a superposition of both atoms reflected classically at the repulsive surface of the condensed matter as well as atoms subjected to quantum reflection due to the attractive long range potential. This work now suggests to carry over this mechanism to the purely optical case by employing a highly sensitive "pump-probe" setup. A strong magnetic background field, created by a pump laser, modifies the QED vacuum to act as an effective potential for traversing probe photons. Since the magnetic field exhibits a spatial (as well as temporal) inhomogeneity, we expect the incoming probe photons to be partially reflected from the region of the inhomogeneity. In our analogy the probe photons play the role of the atoms, while the magnetized quantum vacuum plays the role of the attractive potential created by the condensed matter surface. However, probe photons unaffected by the vacuum fluctuations simply pass the entire region of inhomogeneity. This is in contrast to quantum reflection in the atomic case, where the repulsive potential of the condensed matter gives rise to a large background. We therefore end up with a highly sensitive setup possessing an inherent signal-background separation, which should prove to be an important advantage compared to other experiments aiming to probe fluctuation-induced nonlinearities of the quantum vacuum. Owing to the smallness of the nonlinear effects, one of the biggest challenges for such standard experiments is usually given by the separation of photons carrying the optical signatures from such photons which were unaffected by the fluctuations. First, we lay down the theoretical foundations to describe quantum reflection, and investigate the effect for time-independent magnetic background fields varying in one spatial dimension. We then analyze various background profiles and give estimates for the number of reflected photons employing the design parameters of typical high-intensity laser facilities. The last part deals with a possible extension of the formalism to time-dependent fields.

In this work two methods for the description of atomic bremsstrahlung are discussed. The density matrix of the system after the scattering process is derived using a Rayleigh expansion of the photon interaction operator and a partial wave expansion of the free dirac electron. These derivations were done following Yerokhin and Surzhykov as well as Tseng and Pratt. From these results a new parametrisation of two observables of electron-atom bremsstrahlung is presented which expresses the angular distribution and the degree of linear polarisation in terms of spherical harmonics. That means once the coefficients are calculated the calculation of the bremsstrahlung properties is orders of magnitude faster than the calculations after Yerokhin and Surzhykov [6]. Also almost real-time calculations are possible when the tabulated coefficients are used. The coefficients yield a couple of symmetry relations and converge very fast against zero which reduces the needed expansion order remarkably. Also they behave very smooth when the other parameters are changed so we can get the coefficients for arbitrary parameter sets from an interpolation on a two dimensional grid. The number of coefficients needed increases with the photon energy but does not exceed 50 for energies up to several hundred keV while for energies less than 100keV for most applications a monadic number of coefficients is enough. Additionally the distance between the nodes on the grid can be increased for higher energies because the coefficients vary less for higher energies so less sets of coefficients are necessary to achieve the same accuracy.

Schwinger pair production from the vacuum in rotating time-dependent electric fields is studied using the real-time DHW formalism. This formalism is shortly introduced in general and a specific equation of motion for the purpose of this thesis is derived. Using this equation the time evolution of the Wigner function as well as asymptotic particle distributions neglecting back-reactions on the electric field are determined. Whereas qualitative features can be understood in terms of effective Keldysh parameters, the field rotation leaves characteristic imprints in the momentum distribution that can be interpreted in terms of interference and multiphoton effects.

High-power ultrafast lasers are beneficial for a vast number of applications ranging from fundamental science all the way to industrial scale materials processing. Especially ytterbium-doped fiber lasers have proven to allow for high average power, high pulse energy and remarkable efficiency at the same time. Therefore, they are ideal candidates for most applications. Over the past decades, their output parameters have been scaled by orders of magnitude. However, further power increase is limited by nonlinear and thermal effects, which cause detrimental distortions of the pulses and beams. Promising approaches to overcome these limitations are spatial and temporal coherent beam combination. In this technique, the power and the scaling challenges are distributed among several pulses during the amplification process and afterwards the pulses are combined into a single output pulse. Thereby, the system efficiency is the most crucial parameter, which describes the quality of the pulse combination. Coherent beam combination can be implemented with an (active) or without (passive) a stabilization system. In this work, simultaneous implementing of both spatial and temporal beam combining has been investigated in a passively stabilized setup. A cascaded Sagnac interferometer-type implementation has been used to generate and combine two pulse trains of up to four pulses each. An ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier was placed inside the Sagnac loop and was used as main amplification stage of a pre-existing chirped-pulse-amplification system. Temporal delays of 7 ns and 14 ns for the temporal division of 2 ns stretched pulses have been realized. Investigations at low pulse energy showed system efficiencies larger than 80% that decreased to >60% for high pulse energy. Based on simulations it was shown that this degradation is due to differences of the accumulated nonlinear phases of the divided pulses. An actively stabilized setup is proposed, which is able to compensate for the differences in nonlinearities.

The present work deals with x-ray optics based on bent crystals. Such crystals are used for monochromatic imaging and high-resolution x-ray spectroscopy of laser-produced plasmas. In this thesis, the reflection properties of perfect, elastically bent crystals are investigated and it is shown, that the elastic deformations of these crystals depends not only on the depth in the crystal, as hitherto considered, but also on the lateral coordinates. Beneath these fundamental investigations, the thesis presents a variety of x-ray optics, which demonstrate their application potential. This includes two optics, which are used in the field high repetition rate x-ray sources based on laser-produced plasmas. Furthermore, a new application of toroidally bent crystals presented. These crystals allow for a scheme to measure crystal rocking curves with both great angular and spatial resolution. With this technique, it is possible to detect lateral variations of strain in the order of 10-5 and with lateral resolution better than 20 µm. The last part of the thesis presents an experiment from the field of x-ray spectroscopy of laser-produced plasmas. X-ray emission of ions in high electric fields is analyzed. Therefor the emission of these ions has to be recorded at laser intensities of 1020 W/cm² with high dynamics. To this end, a new spectrometer is developed, which allows to detect the transient subtle changes in the spectra caused by electric fields in the order of TV/m, which are created in laser-plasma experiments.

Within the last decade, many developments towards higher energies and particle numbers paved the way of particle acceleration performed by high intensity laser systems. Up to now, the process of a field-induced acceleration process (Target-Normal-Sheath-Acceleration (TNSA)) is investigated the most. Acceleration occurs as a consequence of separation of charges on a surface potential. Here, the broad energy spectrum is a problem not yet overcome although many improvements were achieved. Calculations for intensities higher than 10^(20..21) W/cm^2 give hint that Radiation-Pressure-Acceleration (RPA) may lead to a sharper, monoenergetic energy spectrum. Within the framework of this thesis, the investigation of the acceleration mechanism is studied experimentally in the intensity range of 10^19 W/cm^2. Suitable targets were developed and applied for patent. A broad range of parameters was scanned by means of high repetition rates together with an adequate laser system to provide high statistics of several thousands of shots, and the dependence of target material, intensity, laser polarisation and pre plasma-conditions was verified. Comparisons with 2-d numeric simulations lead to a model of the acceleration process which was analyzed by several diagnostic methods, giving clear evidence for a new, not field-induced acceleration process. In addition, a system for a continuous variation of the polarization based on reflective optics was developed in order to overcome the disadvantages of retardation plates, and their practicability of high laser energies can be achieved.

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The present thesis details the properties of position-sensitive detectors suited for the Compton polarimetry of high-energy X-ray radiation, investigating double-sided Ge(i) and Si(Li) strip detectors as well as a CdTe-based sensor equipped with the novel Timepix detection chip. In the case of the strip detectors, special concern was dedicated to the so-called charge sharing effect, which denotes an incident photon's charge cloud being distributed across several segments. This obviously hampers the determination of the actual interaction position, a crucial parameter for the Compton-polarimetric analysis. A set of sophisticated software routines to recover such events was developed. Using this modified analysis, the number of multiplicity-1 events reported by the Si(Li) detector was increased by about 30%, while the Ge(i) system, having a much smaller strip width, saw an increase by up to a factor of 30 at energies above 200 keV. Consequently, the number of events usable for the Compton analysis, which has to be restricted to exposures with exactly two discernible interactions, grew in a similar fashion, such that, for the Ge(i) sensor, the computed degree of polarization deviated by as much as 9% from previously obtained values. The wide-stripped Si(Li) detector, on the other hand, proved to be much less susceptible to distortions induced through charge splitting. In addition, Timepix acquisitions made during an electron acceleration experiment conducted at the JETI laser system were evaluated. To avoid saturation of the sensor, extensive shielding and indirect exposure, utilizing a plastic body for scattering, were necessary. While the employed Time-over-Threshold mode returns a pixelwise measure for the energy deposition, neither an absolute nor inter-pixel calibration was possible. However, a clear correlation between the total output signal and the intensity reported by an electron spectrometer could be observed, confirming the Timepix sensor's general capability of energy-resolved measurements. Furthermore, electron tracks that were visible in the obtained data were used to calculate a rough estimate of the primary photon energy by comparing their extent to the predictions of the Continuous Slowing Down Approximation. This yielded initial electron energies in the MeV range, which are in good agreement with the achieved energies reported for the JETI experiment in question.

The present thesis reports on the study of the linear polarization properties of bremsstrahlung produced in polarized electron atom collisions. The experimental investigation of bremsstrahlung photons has been performed using the polarized electron source (SPIN) at the TU Darmstadt. Gold and carbon targets were bombarded with 100 keV electrons whose spin was oriented parallel, anti-parallel and transverse with respect of the beam axis. In addition, an unpolarized electron beam was used for a reference measurement. For the detection of the bremsstrahlung photons, a novel Si(Li) Compton polarimeter has been employed at two different observation angles. This detector enabled the determination of the degree of linear polarization as well as the orientation of the polarization vector for various energies of the bremsstrahlung photons. The emphasis of the work was on the so-called polarization transfer where the polarization of the incoming electron spin influences the polarization of the emitted x-rays. This gives rise to an enhanced degree of linear polarization and to a rotation of the photon polarization vector with respect to the unpolarized case. Both effects were observed by comparing data for the unpolarized and the transversely polarized electron beam. The experimental results are in qualitative agreement with fully relativistic calculations.