Related papers: Laser-driven vacuum breakdown waves
Relativistic, polarized pair-photon fireballs are central to understand the microscopic energy transfer of high-energy astrophysical outflows, yet generating an overdense fireball in the laboratory, especially via an ultraintense laser,…
The extraordinary ability of space-charge waves in plasmas to accelerate charged particles at gradients that are orders of magnitude greater than in current accelerators has been well documented. We develop a phenomenological framework for…
It is shown that two circularly polarised Alfv\'en waves that propagate along the ambient magnetic field in an uniform plasma trigger non oscillating electromagnetic field components when they cross each other. The non-oscilliating field…
Plasma waves generated in the wake of intense, relativistic laser or particle beams can accelerate electron bunches to giga-electronvolt (GeV) energies in centimetre-scale distances. This allows the realization of compact accelerators…
We systematically investigate the field-aligned propagation and collisional absorption of normally incident laser light in a strongly magnetized inhomogeneous plasma. Analytical expressions for electric fields in both vacuum and plasma are…
Interest in air breakdown phenomena has recently been re-kindled with the advent of advanced virtual prototyping of radio frequency (RF) sources for use in high power microwave (HPM) weapons technology. Air breakdown phenomena are of…
We use the quasi-static particle-in-cell code QuickPIC to perform full-scale, one-to-one LWFA numerical experiments, with parameters that closely follow current experimental conditions. The propagation of state-of-the-art laser pulses in…
The strong influence of the electron dynamics provides the possibility of controlling the expansion of laser-produced plasmas by appropriately shaping the laser pulse. A simple irradiation scheme is proposed to tailor the explosion of large…
Recent experimental results from the Trident laser confirm the importance of kinetic effects in determining laser reflectivities at high intensities. Examples observed include scattering from low frequency electron acoustic waves (EAWs),…
The collisionless plasmas in space and astrophysical environments are intrinsically multiscale in nature, behaving as conducting fluids at macroscales and kinetically at microscales comparable to ion- and/or electron-gyroradii. A…
The evolution of an electron beam colliding head-on with a strong plane-wave field is investigated in the framework of strong-field QED including radiation-reaction effects due to photon emission. Employing a kinetic approach to describe…
Experiments with interacting high-velocity flows of laser plasma can help answer the fundamental questions in plasma physics and improve the understanding of the mechanisms behind astrophysical phenomena, such as formation of collisionless…
Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are high-power coherent light sources in the midinfrared and terahertz parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are devices in which the electronic and lattice systems are far from equilibrium, strongly…
The results from 2.5-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations for the interaction of a picosecond-long ignition laser pulse with a plasma pellet of 50-$\mu m$ diameter and 40 critical density are presented. The high density pellet is…
We study the conditions for coherent radiation of an electron bunch driven by a counterpropagating strong pulsed electromagnetic plane wave. We derive the spectrum of the coherent radiation and show that it is emitted backwards with respect…
Advances in the generation of relativistic intensity pulses with wavelengths in the X-ray regime, through high harmonic generation from near-critical plasmas, opens up the possibility of X-ray driven wakefield acceleration. The similarity…
We present a novel electron injection scheme for plasma wakefield acceleration. The method is based on recently proposed technique of fast electron generation via laser-solid interaction: a femtosecond laser pulse with the energy of tens of…
Laser-triggered ionization injection is a promising way of generating controllable high-quality electrons in plasma-based acceleration. We show that ionization injection of electrons into a fully nonlinear plasma wave wake using a laser…
We present results of energetic laser-ion acceleration from a tailored, near solid density gas target. Colliding hydrodynamic shocks compress a pure hydrogen gas jet into a 70 {\mu}m thick target prior to the arrival of the ultra-intense…
Under strong electric fields, an arc of strong current flowing through plasma can link two metal surfaces even in ultra high vacuum. Despite decades of research, the chain of events leading to vacuum arc breakdowns is hitherto unknown.…