Related papers: A Renewable Double Plasma Mirror For Petawatt-clas…
Reaching light intensities above $10^{25}$ W/cm$^{2}$ and up to the Schwinger limit ($10^{29}$ W/cm$^{2}$) would enable testing decades-old fundamental predictions of Quantum Electrodynamics. A promising yet challenging approach to achieve…
High intensity laser-plasma interactions produce a wide array of energetic particles and beams with promising applications. Unfortunately, high repetition rate and high average power requirements for many applications are not satisfied by…
Plasma-based optics have emerged as a powerful platform for manipulating and amplifying ultra-intense laser pulses. However, the inherently nonlinear and dynamic nature of plasma leads to significant spatial, spectral, and temporal…
The advent of ultrahigh-power femtosecond lasers creates a need for optical components suitable to handle ultrahigh light intensities. Due to the unavoidable laser-induced ionization of matter, these components will have to be based on a…
We report an experimental-computational study of the optical properties of plasma mirrors (PMs) at the incident laser frequency when irradiated directly at relativistic intensity (1e18 < I_0 < 1e19 W/cm^2) by near-normally incident (4…
In this letter, cutting-edge 3D Particle-In-Cell simulations are used to demonstrate that so-called relativistic plasma mirrors irradiated by PetaWatt (PW) lasers and naturally curved by laser radiation pressure can be used to tightly focus…
An ideal plasma lens can provide the focusing power of a small f-number, solid-state focusing optic at a fraction of the diameter. An ideal plasma lens, however, relies on a steady-state, linear laser pulse-plasma interaction. Ultrashort…
Relativistic flying mirrors in plasmas are realized as thin dense electron (or electron-ion) layers accelerated by high-intensity electromagnetic waves to velocities close to the speed of light in vacuum. The reflection of an…
Staging multiple laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs), each driven by its own laser pulse, is a promising technique for reaching higher particle energies than achievable in a single LPA. However, introducing subsequent laser pulses for…
We propose a new method for laser pulse compression that uses the spatially varying dispersion of a plasma plume with a density gradient. This novel scheme can be used to compress ultrahigh power lasers. A long, negatively…
With increasing laser peak power, the generation and manipulation of high-power laser pulses becomes a growing challenge for conventional solid-state optics due to their limited damage threshold. As a result, plasma-based optical components…
Reflection at relativistically moving plasma mirrors is a well-known approach for frequency conversion as an alternative to nonlinear techniques. A key issue with plasma mirrors is the need for a high carrier concentration, of order 10^21…
We report on a reflective wave-plate system utilizing phase-shifting mirrors (PSM) for a continuous variation of elliptical polarization without changing the beam position and direction. The scalability of multilayer optics to large…
In this letter, we report Doppler harmonic generation with a relativistic plasma mirror at unprecedented intensities $>10^{21} ~\textrm{W/cm}^2$ using a PetaWatt-class laser. We show that beyond a few $10^{21} ~\textrm{W/cm}^2$ a precise…
We present a direct measurement of the nanoscale dynamics of plasma mirrors using wavefront measurement techniques. This two-dimensional measurement, performed via pump-probe diagnostics, enables the reconstruction of the three-dimensional…
Since the advent of chirped pulse amplification1 the peak power of lasers has grown dramatically and opened the new branch of high field science, delivering the focused irradiance, electric fields of which drive electrons into the…
We report on the first simultaneous measurement of high-order harmonics, relativistic electrons and low divergence proton beams generated from plasma mirrors driven at kHz repetition rate by relativistic-intensity milliJoule-energy…
The efficient generation of intense X-rays and $\gamma$-radiation is studied. The scheme is based on the relativistic mirror concept, {\it i.e.}, a flying thin plasma slab interacts with a counterpropagating laser pulse, reflecting part of…
The question of electromagnetic field intensification towards the values typical for strong field Quantum Electrodynamics is of fundamental importance. One of the most promising intensification schemes is based on the relativistic-flying…
Flying plasma mirrors induced by intense lasers has been proposed as a promising way to generate few-cycle EUV or X-ray lasers. In addition, if such a relativistic plasma mirror can accelerate, then it would serve as an analog black hole to…