Ptychographic measurements of ultrahigh-intensity laser-plasma interactions

The extreme intensities now delivered by femtosecond lasers make it possible to drive and control relativistic motion of charged particles with light, opening a path to compact particle accelerators and coherent X-ray sources. Accurately characterizing the dynamics of ultrahigh-intensity laser-plasma interactions as well as the resulting light and particle emissions is an essential step towards such achievements. This remains a considerable challenge, as the relevant scales typically range from picoseconds to attoseconds in time, and from micrometres to nanometres in space. In these experiments, owing to the extreme prevalent physical conditions, measurements can be performed only at macroscopic distances from the targets, yielding only partial information at these microscopic scales. This letter presents a major advance by applying the concepts of ptychography to such measurements, and thus retrieving microscopic information hardly accessible until now. This paves the way to a general approach for the metrology of extreme laser-plasma interactions on very small spatial and temporal scales.