European XFEL: Turn-key, High Repetition rate Femtosecond Laser System for the X-ray Photon Diagnostics (XPD) Laser Laboratory

The European XFEL is a research facility of superlatives: it generates ultrashort X-ray flashes-27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources. To construct and operate the European XFEL, international partners agreed on the foundation of an independent research organisation — the European XFEL GmbH (‘EuXFEL’), a non-profit limited liability Company under German law. The company employs more than 400 people. A new project of developing a new type of instrumentation for temporal diagnostics, based on the so-called THz streaking technique, was approved. In order to provide an optimal THz beam and a maximised THz field, XPD requires a suitable laser source. In the long-term, this laser can serve to prepare further setups, and to improve within R&D projects the THz-generation efficiency and to develop new THz-characterisation tools.