Related papers: Maximizing energy deposition by shaping few-cycle …
Few-cycle pulses present an essential tool to track ultrafast dynamics in matter and drive strong field effects. To address photon-hungry applications, high average power lasers are used which, however, cannot directly provide sub-100 fs…
A new mechanism of enhanced laser energy absorption in plasma microglobules is demonstrated with the help of two-dimensional Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. The mechanism relies on the excitation of surface and bulk waves and the…
We report the results of a study of the role of prescribed geometrical structures on the front of a target in determining the energy and spatial distribution of relativistic laser-plasma electrons. Our 3D PIC simulation studies apply to…
The pair-production process in the presence of strong linearly polarized laser fields with a subcycle structure is considered. Laser pulses with different envelope shapes are examined by means of a nonperturbative numerical technique. We…
A high repetition rate electron source was generated by tightly focusing kHz, few-mJ laser pulses into an underdense plasma. This high intensity laser-plasma interaction led to stable electron beams over several hours but with strikingly…
We demonstrate a scheme for enhanced proton acceleration from near-critical-density targets by splitting a laser pulse into a linearly and a circularly polarized laser pulse. The combination of two laser pulses generates a shock wave as…
A new phenomenon of enhancing the relativistic transparency of overdense plasmas by the influence of hot-electron refluxing has been found via particle-in-cell simulations. When a p-polarized laser pulse, with intensity below the…
Among the approaches to the proposed mitigation and remediation of the space debris problem is the de-orbiting of objects in low Earth orbit through irradiation by ground-based high-intensity pulsed lasers. Laser ablation of a thin surface…
In the interaction of laser pulses of extreme intensity ($>10^{23}~{\rm W cm}^{-2}$) with high-density, thick plasma targets, simulations show significant radiation friction losses, in contrast to thin targets for which such losses are…
Beam loading is the phenomenon which limits the charge and the beam quality in plasma based accelerators. An experimental study conducted with a laser-plasma accelerator is presented. Beam loading manifests itself through the decrease of…
The dynamics of electron injection in the direct laser acceleration (DLA) regime was investigated by means of three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations and theoretical analysis. It is shown that when an ultra-intense laser pulse…
Ion beams generated with ultra-intense lasers-plasma accelerators hold promises to provide compact and affordable beams of relativistic ions. One of the most efficient acceleration setups was demonstrated to be direct acceleration by the…
Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is applied to laser breakdown in argon and xenon under pressures up to 40atm to obtain 2D images of the plasma dynamics of single events with a spatial resolution of 250x100 pixels and an equivalent…
The interaction of intense laser fields with silver and argon clusters is investigated theoretically using a modified nanoplasma model. Single pulse and double pulse excitations are considered. The influence of the dense cluster environment…
In simulations of a 12.5PW laser (focused intensity I = 4x10^23W/cm^2) striking a solid aluminium target 10% of the laser energy is converted to gamma-rays. A dense electron-positron plasma is generated with a maximum density of 10^26/m^3;…
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…
Dense high-energy monoenergetic proton beams are vital for wide applications, thus modern laser-plasma-based ion acceleration methods are aiming to obtain high-energy proton beams with energy spread as low as possible. In this work, we put…
Compression of UV femtosecond laser pulses focused into a gas cell filled with xenon is reported numerically. With a large negative Kerr index and normal dispersion, xenon promotes temporal modulational instability (MI) which can be…
Plasma densification through magnetic compression has been suggested for time-resolved control of the wave properties in plasma-based accelerators. Using particle in cell simulations with real mass ratio, the practicality of large magnetic…
Laser cooling of molecules employing broadband optical pumping involves a timescale separation between laser excitation and spontaneous emission. Here, we optimize the optical pumping step using shaped laser pulses. We derive two…