Related papers: Radiation Pressure Acceleration by Ultraintense La…
We study electron acceleration within a sub-critical plasma channel irradiated by an ultra-intense laser pulse ($a_0>100$ or $I>10^{22}~\mathrm{W/cm^2}$). In this regime, radiation reaction significantly alters the electron dynamics. This…
Fundamental to many applications of laser pulses in science and technology is an extended interaction length with matter that significantly exceeds the distance over which the pulse would normally diffract and transversely spread. At low…
Raman amplification of a short laser pulse off a long laser beam has been demonstrated successfully for moderate probe intensities ($\sim 10^{16}$ W/cm$^2$) and widths ($\sim 50$ micron). However, truly competitive intensities can only be…
It is observed that the interaction of an intense ultra-short laser pulse with an overdense gas jet results in the pulse collapse and the deposition of a significant part of energy in a small and well localized volume in the rising part of…
Experimental results, supported by precise modelling, demonstrate optimisation of a plasma-based injector with intermediate laser pulse energy ($<1$ J), corresponding to a normalised vector potential $a_0 = 2.15$, using ionisation injection…
The random phase approximation (RPA) for the correlation energy functional of density functional theory has recently attracted renewed interest. Formulated in terms of the Kohn-Sham (KS) orbitals and eigenvalues, it promises to resolve some…
Electron acceleration has been optimized based on 3D PIC simulations of a short laser pulse interacting with low-density plasma targets to find the pulse propagation regime that maximizes the charge of high-energy electron bunches. This…
We review recent PIC simulation results which show that double-sided irradiaton of a thin overdense plasma slab by ultra-intense laser pulses from both sides can lead to sustained comoving acceleration of surface electrons to energies much…
In the electron-driven fast-ignition approach to inertial confinement fusion, petawatt laser pulses are required to generate MeV electrons that deposit several tens of kilojoules in the compressed core of an imploded DT shell. We review…
Optimizing laser and plasma parameters is crucial for enhancing accelerated proton energy in laser-driven proton acceleration with finite laser energy for applications such as cancer therapy. Tight focusing plays a significant role in…
Raman amplification in plasma has been promoted as a means of compressing picosecond optical laser pulses to femtosecond duration to explore the intensity frontier. Here we show for the first time that it can be used, with equal success, to…
Cancer therapy for deep-seated tumors requires precise irradiation of a small target deep within the patient while minimizing radiation exposure to surrounding tissues. This can be accomplished with a round beam sharply converging towards a…
Laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs), producing high-quality electron beams, provide an opportunity to reduce the size of free-electron lasers (FELs) to only a few meters. A complete system is proposed here, which is based on FEL technology and…
A laser-boosted relativistic solid-density paraboloidal foil is known to efficiently reflect and focus a counterpropagating laser pulse. Here we show that in the case of an ultrarelativistic counterpropagating pulse, a high-energy and…
An effective theory of laser--plasma based particle acceleration is presented. Here we treated the plasma as a continuous medium with an index of refraction $n_{m}$ in which a single electron propagates. Because of the simplicity of this…
Theoretical investigations show that linearly and radially polarized multiterawatt and petawatt laser beams, focused to subwavelength waist radii, can directly accelerate protons and carbon nuclei, over micron-size distances, to the…
Using multi-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations we study ion acceleration from a foil irradiated by a circularly polarized laser pulse at 1022W/cm^2 intensity. When the foil is shaped initially in the transverse direction to…
We study the radiation damping effect on the relativistic acceleration of electron-positron plasmas with two-and-half-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. Particles are accelerated by Poynting flux via the diamagnetic relativistic…
It is proposed a new method of compressing laser pulse by fast extending plasma gratings(FEPG), which is created by ionizing the hypersound wave generated by stimulated Brillouin scattering(SBS) in the background gas. Ionized by a short…
The extreme electric fields created in high-intensity laser-plasma interactions could generate energetic ions far more compactly than traditional accelerators. Despite this promise, laser-plasma accelerators have remained stagnant at…