Attotech Handelsbolag was created by Erik Mansten (former Gustafsson) and Thierry Ruchon in november 2006. The founders were both working in the attosecond science group led by Anne L'Huillier, located in the department of Atomic Physics at Lund University. Attotech collaborates with a local company that manufactures the main hard parts of the product. The proximity of this workshop and the small size of Attotech makes easy to build a product that in an excellent manner fits your needs. Attotech is open to discussions to custom-make any pulsed valve.
The rep-rate of the intense lasers used in high field physics reaches nowadays the kHz regime. The device that may limit the counting statistics in this field often becomes the frequency of the injection of gas in the vacuum chambers. For instance, for using a velocity map imaging spectrometer (VMIS) one may appreciate being able to collect data at a kHz rate, which imposes using a gas valve at the kHz rate. By the same token, if one uses a kHz laser to shoot at a gas target, the density of atoms reachable is often limited by the amount of gas that can be pumped away. Using a kHz target that is only open one tenth of the time, one access ten times higher densities. This last example is the one that drove us to develop the Attotech pulse valve. It has been tested in our attosecond setup over the past year, and allowed us to obtain trains of attosecond pulses in a new wavelength range (around 80 eV), with an unprecedented short duration (130 as). The products we propose are either copies of the one we used in this experiment, or custom made ones to fit in a specific setup.