Related papers: High-Contrast Chirped-Pulse Amplification Enabled …
Proposals to reach the next generation of laser intensities through Raman or Brillouin backscattering have centered on optical frequencies. Higher frequencies are beyond the range of such methods mainly due to the wave damping that…
Extreme intensity contrast is considered essential for ultraintense, femtosecond laser excitation of solid targets, in particular for studies with structured or ultra-thin targets. Second-harmonic generation has been used to maximize the…
Ultra-intense laser-matter interaction experiments (>10$^{18}$ W/cm$^{2}$) with dense targets are highly sensitive to the effect of laser "noise" (in the form of pre-pulses) preceding the main ultra-intense pulse. These system-dependent…
It is shown by particle-in-cell simulation that intense circularly polarized (CP) laser light can be contained in the cavity of a solid-density circular Al-plasma shell for hundreds of light-wave periods before it is dissipated by…
High-gain optical parametric amplification is an important nonlinear process used both as a source of coherent infrared light and as a source of nonclassical light. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an approach to optical…
We study the effects of arbitrary laser pulse excitations on quantum correlation, entanglement and the role of quantum noise. The transient quantities are computed exactly using a method that provides exact solutions of the Langevin field…
Active energy compression scheme is presently being investigated for future laser-plasma accelerators. This method enables generating laser-plasma accelerator electron beams with a small, $\sim 10^{-5}$, relative slice energy spread. When…
We report a systematic investigation into the processes behind a near hundredfold enhanced second harmonic wave generated from a laser-induced air plasma, by examining the temporal dynamics of the frequency conversion processes, and the…
A simple approach to generate high-energy few-cycle optical vortices with minimized topological charge dispersion is introduced. By means of numerical simulations it is shown that, by leveraging the intrinsic properties of optical…
Photoacoustic (PA) imaging of deep tissue tends to employ Q-switched lasers with high pulse energy to generate high optical fluence and therefore high PA signal. Compared to Q-switched lasers, pulsed laser diodes (PLDs) typically generate…
We report new detailed density profile measurements in expanding strongly-coupled neutral plasmas. Using laser-induced fluorescence techniques, we determine plasma densities in the range of 10^5 to 10^9/cm^3 with a time resolution limit as…
Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy is a preferred technique for fast and direct multi-elemental mapping of samples under ambient pressure, without any limitation on the targeted element. However, LIBS mapping data have two peculiarities:…
We investigate the different facets of ion acceleration by a relativistically intense circularly polarized laser pulse interacting with thin near-critical density plasma targets. Our simulations establish that plasma density gradient and…
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…
Optical pump-probe spectroscopy is a powerful tool to directly probe the carrier dynamics in materials down to sub-femtosecond resolution. To perform such measurement, while keeping the pump induced perturbation to the sample as small as…
Production of particle-antiparticle pairs by a high-energy probe photon propagating through a high-intensity laser field is considered in the nonperturbative interaction regime. The laser field consists of a strong low-frequency and a weak…
Laser-plasma accelerators offer a compact means of producing high-energy electron beams, but their performance is fundamentally limited by dephasing between the accelerated electrons and the plasma wave. To overcome this limitation, we…
In this paper we discuss the bandwidth enhancement that can be achieved in multi-Joule optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) systems exploiting the tunability of parametric amplification. In particular, we consider a pair…
Pulse self-compression followed by the generation of resonant radiation is a well known phenomenon in non-linear optics. Resonant radiation is important as it allows for efficient and tunable wavelength conversion. We vary the chirp of the…
Intrinsic to the process of high-order harmonic generation is the creation of plasma and the resulting spatiotemporal distortions of the driving laser pulse. Inside a high finesse cavity where the driver pulse and gas medium are reused,…