Abstract

The development of high peak power, ultrashort pulse duration Ti:sapphire laser systems¹-² has led to the generation of hard, incoherent x-rays from laser-produced-plasmas (LPP).³ In these experiments x-rays with energies as high as 1.5 MeV were produced. Also generated were copious amounts of diagnostic x-rays (20 keV to 150 keV). This fact suggests that ultrashort-pulse-pumped, LPP x-ray sources may have uses in medical imaging applications. In particular, there are two distinct differences between the LPP x-ray source and conventional x-ray sources, namely source duration and source size. The duration of the LPP source is believed to be <1 ps or nearly 6 orders of magnitude shorter than conventional x-ray sources. Because of this, it becomes possible to consider time gated imaging arrangements which require greatly reduced x-ray exposures to create the same quality image of a patient. The source size of the LPP x-ray source may be as much as 100 times smaller than conventional devices and thus may allow imaging of much smaller features than previously possible.

© 1994 Optical Society of America