Related papers: Laser Compression via fast-extending plasma gratin…
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…
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…
Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation results of sustained acceleration of electron-positron (e+e-) plasmas by comoving electromagnetic (EM) pulses are presented. When a thin slab of overdense e+e- plasma is irradiated with linear-polarized…
We propose a new approach to high-intensity laser-driven electron acceleration in a plasma. Here, we demonstrate that a plasma wave generated by a stimulated forward-scattering of an incident laser pulse can be in a longest acceleration…
Generation of ultrashort X-ray pulses in a free-electron laser relies on high-density electron bunches with a precisely adjusted current and energy distribution. To this end, robust and flexible electron bunch manipulation techniques are…
This dissertation explores the interaction between high-intensity lasers and plasmas to accelerate electrons and produce radiation via experimental and computational efforts. The laser pulses used in this dissertation have ultrashort…
Ionization is a fundamental process in intense laser-matter interactions, and is known to cause plasma defocusing and intensity clamping. Here, we investigate theoretically the propagation dynamics of an intense laser pulse in a helium gas…
We demonstrate a new highly tunable technique for generating meter-scale low density plasma waveguides. Such guides can enable electron acceleration to tens of GeV in a single stage. Plasma waveguides are imprinted in hydrogen gas by…
Post-compression of ultra-short laser pulses via self-phase modulation is routinely employed for the generation of laser pulses with optical bandwidths reaching far beyond the laser gain limitations. While high compression factors can be…
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…
Proton acceleration by ultra-intense laser pulse irradiating a target with cross-section smaller than the laser spot size and connected to a parabolic density channel is investigated. The target splits the laser into two parallel…
We demonstrate compression and shaping of few cycle pulses from a high average power Ytterbium laser system. The pulses from a commercial 20 W, 100 kHz Yb laser system are spectrally broadened in two-stages using gas-filled, stretched…
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…
A novel regime of self-compression is proposed for plasma-based backward Raman amplification(BRA) upon flying focus. By using a pumping focus moving with a speed equal to the group velocity of stimulated Raman backscattering(SRBS), only a…
We perform a post-compression of high energy pulses by using optical-field ionization of low pressure helium gas in a guided geometry. We apply this approach to a TW chirped-pulse-amplification based Ti:Sapphire laser chain and show that…
We report generation of ultrashort UV pulses by soliton self-compression in kagom\'e-style hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with ambient air. Pump pulses with energy 2.6 uJ and duration 54 fs at 400 nm were compressed temporally by…
The simultaneous laser-driven acceleration and angular manipulation of the fast electron beam is experimentally demonstrated. The bunch of multi-MeV energy charged particles is generated during the propagation of the femtosecond laser pulse…
We have developed low-dispersion (1480 l/mm), resonance-free, diffraction gratings made of dielectric materials resistant to femtosecond laser damage $(SiO_{2}/HfO_{2})$. A 14 cm diameter sample was fabricated resulting in a mean…
This paper presents a simplified theoretical model for the study of emission from laser produced plasma to better understand the processes and the factors involved in the onset of saturation in plasma emission as well as in increasing…
We propose a new approach to high-intensity relativistic laser-driven electron acceleration in a plasma. Here, we demonstrate that a plasma wave generated by a stimulated forward-scattering of an incident laser pulse can be in the longest…