English

Fields of an ultrashort tightly-focused laser pulse

Optics 2016-04-20 v2

Abstract

Analytic expressions for the electromagnetic fields of an ultrashort, tightly focused, linearly polarized laser pulse in vacuum are derived from scalar and vector potentials, using a small parameter which assumes a small bandwidth of the laser pulse. The derived fields are compared with those of the Lax series expansion and the complex-source-point approaches and are shown to be well-behaved and accurate even in the subcycle pulse regime. We further demonstrate that terms stemming from the scalar potential and due to a fast varying pulse envelope are non-negligible and may significantly influence laser-matter interactions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.00988,
  title  = {Fields of an ultrashort tightly-focused laser pulse},
  author = {Jian-Xing Li and Yousef I. Salamin and Karen Z. Hatsagortsyan and Christoph H. Keitel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.00988},
  year   = {2016}
}