Today I take you to a tour through the PHELIX laser bay and my part of the experiment. The "Petawatt High Energy Laser for Heavy Ion Experiments" is able to generate a Laser burst with up to 200 J Energy within 0.7picoseconds. We are using 2 bursts so only 20~30J Energy per burst. The 1st one is a few ns long and heats up a thin foil or plastic target and generates a plasma. This plasma is then illuminated by the 2nd 0.7ps pulse. Those Xrays are used to image the plasma.

My task is to try measuring the spectrum of the Xrays (of the 2nd pulse) using a Timepix3 detector. This is then used to improve the image reconstruction.

https://www.gsi.de/en/work/research/appamml/plasma_physicsphelix/phelix.htm
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petawatt_High_Energy_Laser_for_Heavy_Ion_Experiments
https://medipix.web.cern.ch/technology-chip/timepix3-chip

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