Related papers: Towards the Optimisation of Direct Laser Accelerat…
In laser-solid interactions, electrons may be generated and subsequently accelerated to energies of the order-of-magnitude of the ponderomotive limit, with the underlying process dominated by direct laser acceleration. Breaking this limit,…
A laser-driven azimuthal plasma magnetic field is known to facilitate electron energy gain from the irradiating laser pulse. The enhancement is due to changes in the orientation between the laser electric field and electron velocity caused…
Positron creation and acceleration is one of the major challenges for constructing future lepton colliders. On the one hand, conventional technology can provide a solution, but at a prohibitive cost and scale. On the other hand,…
Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) use the nearfields created when a laser pulse impinges on a dielectric structure to accelerate charged particles. We provide an overview of the theory of operation of photon driven accelerators, from…
A new type of proton acceleration stemming from large-scale gradients, low-density targets, irradiated by an intense near-infrared laser is observed. The produced protons are characterized by high-energies (with a broad spectrum), are…
Strong electromagnetic pulses (EMP) are generated from intense laser interactions with solid-density targets, and can be guided by the target geometry, specifically through conductive connections to the ground. We present an experimental…
Longitudinal ion acceleration from high-intensity (I ~ 10^20 Wcm^-2) laser interactions with helium gas jet targets (n_e ~ 0.04 n_c) have been observed. The ion beam has a maximum energy for He^2+ of approximately 40 MeV and was directional…
Exact closed-form solutions to Maxwell's equations are used to investigate the acceleration of electrons in vacuum driven by ultrashort and nonparaxial radially polarized laser pulses. We show that the threshold power above which…
The interaction of an ultra-intense laser pulse with a near critical density target results in the formation of a plasma channel, a strong azimuthal magnetic field and moving vortices. An application of this is the generation of energetic…
In addition to the ponderomotive acceleration of highly relativistic electrons at interaction of very short and very intense laser pulses, a further acceleration is derived from the interaction of these electron beams with the spontaneous…
An experiment for studying laser self-guiding has been carried out for the high power ultrashort pulse laser interaction with an underdense plasma slab. Formation of an extremely long plasma channel and its bending are observed when the…
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…
Understanding the interaction of kilojoule, picosecond laser pulse with long-scale length preplasma or homogeneous near critical density (NCD) plasma is crucial for guiding experiments at national short-pulse laser facilities. Using full…
We have investigated numerically the coupling between a 10 \si{MeV} electron bunch of high charge (\SI{> 100}{pc}) with a laser generated accelerating plasma wave. Our results show that a high efficiency coupling can be achieved using a…
We investigate by particle-in-cell simulations in two and three dimensions the laser-plasma interaction and the proton acceleration in multilayer targets where a low density "near-critical" layer of a few micron thickness is added on the…
The future applications of the short-duration, multi-MeV ion beams produced in the interaction of high-intensity laser pulses with solid targets will require improvements in the conversion efficiency, peak ion energy, beam monochromaticity,…
The radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) of charged particles has been considered a challenging task in laser particle acceleration. Laser-driven proton/ion acceleration has attracted considerable interests due to its underlying physics…
A novel regime is proposed where, employing linearly polarized laser pulses at intensities $10^{21}\textrm{Wcm}^{-2}$ as two order of magnitude lower than earlier predicted [T. Esirkepov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 175003 (2004)], ions are…
We investigate a single-laser scheme for reaching the strong-field QED regime based on direct laser acceleration (DLA) of electrons followed by their head-on collision with the same laser pulse reflected from an overdense foil. In this…
Energetic ions have been observed since the very first laser-plasma experiments.Their origin was found to be the charge separation of electrons heated by thelaser, which transfers energy to the ions accelerated in the field. The adventof…