Related papers: Optical Shock-Enhanced Self-Photon Acceleration
The acceleration of ions from ultra-thin foils has been investigated using 250 TW, sub-ps laser pulses, focused on target at intensities up to $3\times10^{20} \Wcm2$. The ion spectra show the appearance of narrow band features for proton…
Maximizing nonlinear light-matter interactions is a primary motive for compressing laser pulses to achieve ultrashort transform limited pulses. Here we show how, by appropriately shaping the pulses, resonant multiphoton transitions can be…
Plasma accelerators driven by intense laser or particle beams provide gigavolt-per-meter accelerating fields, promising to drastically shrink particle accelerators for high-energy physics and photon science. Applications such as linear…
Time-dependent nonlinear media, such as rapidly generated plasmas produced via laser ionization of gases, can increase the energy of individual laser photons and generate tunable high-order harmonic pulses. This phenomenon, known as photon…
Laser wakefield accelerators rely on relativistically moving micron-sized plasma cavities that provide extremely high electric field >100GV/m. Here, we demonstrate transverse shaping of the plasma cavity to produce controlled sub-GeV…
Photon engineering can be exploited to control the nonlinear evolution of the drive pulse in a laser-plasma accelerator (LPA), offering new avenues to tailor electron beam phase space on a femtosecond time scale. One promising option is to…
We report on the depletion and power amplification of the driving laser pulse in a strongly-driven laser wakefield accelerator. Simultaneous measurement of the transmitted pulse energy and temporal shape indicate an increase in peak power…
We report on the first results of laser plasma wakefield acceleration driven by ultrashort mid-infrared laser pulses (\lambda= 3.9 \mu m, 100 fs, 0.25 TW), which enable near- and above-critical density interactions with moderate-density gas…
Laser powered dielectric structures achieve high-gradient particle acceleration by taking advantage of modern laser technology capable of producing electric fields in excess of 10GV/m. These fields can drive the bulk dielectric beyond its…
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…
An effective scheme of synchronized laser-triggered ion acceleration and the corresponding theoretical model are proposed for a slow light pulse of relativistic intensity, which penetrates into a near-critical-density plasma, strongly…
Propagation of short and ultra-intense laser pulses in a semi-infinite space of overdense hydrogen plasma is analyzed via fully-relativistic, real geometry particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations including radiation friction. The relativistic…
Controlling the intensity distribution of laser pulses in the focal region is essential for optimizing optically generated plasma waveguides and enabling advanced plasma acceleration techniques, including dephasingless wakefield…
We demonstrate that electrons can be efficiently accelerated to high energy in spatially non-uniform, intense laser fields. Laser non-uniformities occur when a perfect plane wave reflects off a randomly perturbed surface. By solving for…
Direct laser acceleration (DLA) offers a compact source of high-charge, energetic electrons for generating secondary radiation or neutrons. While DLA in high-density plasma optimizes the energy transfer from a laser pulse to electrons, it…
Efficient laser ion acceleration requires high laser intensities, which can only be obtained by tightly focusing laser radiation. In the radiation pressure acceleration regime, where the tightly focused laser driver leads to the appearance…
In the frame of laser-driven wakefield acceleration, the main characteristics oflaser propagation and plasma wave excitation are described, with an emphasis onthe role of propagation distance for electron acceleration. To…
We discovered a simple regime where a near-critical plasma irradiated by a laser of experimentally available intensity can self-organize to produce positrons and accelerate them to ultra-relativistic energies. The laser pulse piles up…
A single laser pulse with spot size smaller than half its wavelength ($w_0 < \lambda/2$) can provide a net energy gain to ultra-relativistic particles. In this paper, we discuss the properties of an optical cell consisting of $N$ sub-cycle…
A large distance propagation in turbulent atmosphere results in disintegration of laser beam into speckles. We find that the most intense speckle approximately preserves both the Gaussian shape and the diameter of the initial collimated…