Single shot temporal profile measurement of a soft X ray laser pulse
We report an original method allowing to recover the temporal profile of any kind of soft X ray laser pulse in single shot operation. We irradiated a soft X ray multilayer mirror with an intense infrared femtosecond laser pulse in a traveling wave geometry and took advantage of the sudden reflectivity drop of the mirror to reconstruct the temporal profile of the soft X ray pulse. We inferred a pulse shape with a duration of a few ps in good agreement with numerical calculations and experimental work.