English

Relativistic, single-cycle tunable-infrared pulses generated by a tailored plasma density structure

Plasma Physics 2018-08-15 v1 Optics

Abstract

The availability of intense, ultrashort coherent radiation sources in the infrared region of the spectrum is enabling the generation of attosecond X-ray pulses via high harmonic generation, pump-probe experiments in the "molecular fingerprint" region and opening up the area of relativistic-infrared nonlinear optics of plasmas. These applications would benefit from multi-millijoule single-cycle pulses in the mid to long wavelength infrared (LW-IR) region. Here we present a new scheme capable of producing tunable relativistically intense, single-cycle infrared pulses from 5-14μ\mum with a 1.7% conversion efficiency based on a photon frequency downshifting scheme that uses a tailored plasma density structure. The carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the LW-IR pulse is locked to that of the drive laser to within a few percent. Such a versatile tunable IR source may meet the demands of many cutting-edge applications in strong-field physics and greatly promote their development.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.09182,
  title  = {Relativistic, single-cycle tunable-infrared pulses generated by a tailored plasma density structure},
  author = {Zan Nie and Chih-Hao Pai and Jianfei Hua and Chaojie Zhang and Yipeng Wu and Yang Wan and Fei Li and Jie Zhang and Zhi Cheng and Qianqian Su and Shuang Liu and Yue Ma and Xiaonan Ning and Yunxiao He and Wei Lu and Hsu-Hsin Chu and Jyhpyng Wang and Warren B. Mori and Chan Joshi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.09182},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6 figures

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