Enhanced ion acceleration from transparency-driven foils demonstrated at two ultraintense laser facilities.

Laser-driven ion sources are a rapidly developing technology producing high energy, high peak current beams. Their suitability for applications, such as compact medical accelerators, motivates development of robust acceleration schemes using widely available repetitive ultraintense femtosecond lasers. These applications not only require high beam energy, but also place demanding requirements on the source stability and controllability. This can be seriously affected by the laser temporal contrast, precluding the replication of ion acceleration performance on independent laser systems with otherwise similar parameters. Here, we present the experimental generation of >60 MeV protons and >30 MeV u-1 carbon ions from sub-micrometre thickness Formvar foils irradiated with laser intensities >1021 Wcm2. Ions are accelerated by an extreme localised space charge field ≳30 TVm-1, over a million times higher than used in conventional accelerators. The field is formed by a rapid expulsion of electrons from the target bulk due to relativistically induced transparency, in which relativistic corrections to the refractive index enables laser transmission through normally opaque plasma. We replicate the mechanism on two different laser facilities and show that the optimum target thickness decreases with improved laser contrast due to reduced pre-expansion. Our demonstration that energetic ions can be accelerated by this mechanism at different contrast levels relaxes laser requirements and indicates interaction parameters for realising application-specific beam delivery.

Relativistic flying forcibly oscillating reflective diffraction grating.

Relativistic flying forcibly oscillating reflective diffraction gratings are formed by an intense laser pulse (driver) in plasma. The mirror surface is an electron density singularity near the joining area of the wake wave cavity and the bow wave; it moves together with the driver laser pulse and undergoes forced oscillations induced by the field. A counterpropagating weak laser pulse (source) is incident at grazing angles, being efficiently reflected and enriched by harmonics. The reflected spectrum consists of the source pulse base frequency and its harmonics, multiplied by a large factor due to the double Doppler effect.

4π-spherically focused electromagnetic wave: diffraction optics approach and high-power limits.

The focused field and its intensity distribution achieved by the 4π-spherical focusing scheme are investigated within the framework of diffraction optics. Generalized mathematical formulas describing the spatial distributions of the focused electric and magnetic fields are derived for the transverse magnetic and transverse electric mode electromagnetic waves with and without the orbital angular momentum attribute. The mathematical formula obtained shows no singularity in the field in the focal region and satisfies the finite field strength and electromagnetic energy conditions. The 4π-spherical focusing of the transverse magnetic mode electromagnetic wave provides the highest field strength at the focus and the peak intensity reaches 1026 W/cm2 for the laser power of 100 PW at 800 nm wavelength. As an example of using the mathematical formula, the electron-positron pair production via the Schwinger mechanism is analyzed and compared with previous results.

High-contrast high-intensity repetitive petawatt laser.

We report the generation of 63 J of broadband pulse energies at 0.1 Hz from the J-KAREN-P laser, which is based on an OPCPA/Ti:sapphire hybrid architecture. Pulse compression down to 30 fs indicates a peak power of over 1 PW. High temporal contrast of 1012 prior to the main pulse has been demonstrated with 10 J output energy. High intensities of 1022 W/cm2 on target by focusing a 0.3 PW laser with an f/1.3 off-axis parabolic mirror have been achieved. Fundamental processes of laser matter interaction at over 1022 W/cm2 intensities belong to a new branch of science that will be the principal research task of our infrastructure.

Possible Precise Measurement of Delbrück Scattering Using Polarized Photon Beams.

The advent of high-flux-polarized γ-ray sources makes possible the nearly isolated precise measurement of the vacuum contribution, Delbrück scattering, to the elastic scattering of these photons off nuclei. Because of the fact that the elastic scattering of the photons is a coherent summation of four processes and that up to now unpolarized sources have been used, the isolated measurement of Delbrück scattering has not been performed. We show that for the appropriate choice of scattering angles, photon polarization, and energies this scattering can be measured nearly independently of other scattering processes. This makes possible the precise measurement of the vacuum contribution to scattering and the possibility of the detection of new physics.

Revealing the second harmonic generation in a femtosecond laser-driven cluster-based plasma by analyzing shapes of Ar XVII spectral lines.

We present experiments dealing with a femtosecond laser-driven cluster-based plasma, where by analyzing the nonlinear phenomenon of satellites of spectral lines of Ar XVII, we revealed the nonlinear phenomenon of the generation of the second harmonic of the laser frequency. For performing this analysis we developed new results in the theory of satellites of spectral lines. From such lineshape analysis we found, in particular, that the efficiency of converting the short (40 fs) intense (3x10¹8 W/cm²) incident laser light into the second harmonic was 2%. This result is in the excellent agreement with the 2-Dimensional Particle-In-Cell (2D PIC) simulation that we also performed. There is also an order of magnitude agreement between the thresholds for the SHG found from the line shape analysis and from the 2D PIC simulations.

High-power γ-ray flash generation in ultraintense laser-plasma interactions.

When high-intensity laser interaction with matter enters the regime of dominated radiation reaction, the radiation losses open the way for producing short pulse high-power γ-ray flashes. The γ-ray pulse duration and divergence are determined by the laser pulse amplitude and by the plasma target density scale length. On the basis of theoretical analysis and particle-in-cell simulations with the radiation friction force incorporated, optimal conditions for generating a γ-ray flash with a tailored overcritical density target are found.

Lorentz-Abraham-Dirac versus Landau-Lifshitz radiation friction force in the ultrarelativistic electron interaction with electromagnetic wave (exact solutions).

When the parameters of electron-extreme power laser interaction enter the regime of dominated radiation reaction, the electron dynamics changes qualitatively. The adequate theoretical description of this regime becomes crucially important with the use of the radiation friction force either in the Lorentz-Abraham-Dirac form, which possesses unphysical runaway solutions, or in the Landau-Lifshitz form, which is a perturbation valid for relatively low electromagnetic wave amplitude. The goal of the present paper is to find the limits of the Landau-Lifshitz radiation force applicability in terms of the electromagnetic wave amplitude and frequency. For this, a class of the exact solutions to the nonlinear problems of charged particle motion in the time-varying electromagnetic field is used.

Schwinger limit attainability with extreme power lasers.

High intensity colliding laser pulses can create abundant electron-positron pair plasma [A. R. Bell and J. G. Kirk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 200403 (2008)], which can scatter the incoming electromagnetic waves. This process can prevent one from reaching the critical field of quantum electrodynamics at which vacuum breakdown and polarization occur. Considering the pairs are seeded by the Schwinger mechanism, it is shown that the effects of radiation friction and the electron-positron avalanche development in vacuum depend on the electromagnetic wave polarization. For circularly polarized colliding pulses, these effects dominate not only the particle motion but also the evolution of the pulses. For linearly polarized pulses, these effects are not as strong. There is an apparent analogy of these cases with circular and linear electron accelerators to the corresponding constraining and reduced roles of synchrotron radiation losses.

Integration of the Lorentz-Dirac equation: Interaction of an intense laser pulse with high-energy electrons.

Usually the motion of an electron under the influence of electromagnetic fields is influenced to a small extent by radiation damping. With the advent of high power high irradiance lasers it has become possible to generate focused laser irradiances where electrons interacting with the laser become highly relativistic over very short time and spatial scales. By focusing petawatt class lasers to very small spot sizes the amount of radiation emitted by electrons can become very large. Resultingly, the damping of the electron motion by the emission of this radiation can become large. In order to study this problem a code is written to solve a set of equations describing the evolution of a strong electromagnetic wave interacting with a single electron. Usually the equation of motion of an electron including radiation damping under the influence of electromagnetic fields is derived from the Lorentz-Dirac equation treating the damping as a perturbation. We use this equation to integrate forward in time and use the Lorentz-Dirac equation to integrate backward in time. We show that for very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation deep in the quantum regime at high irradiances differences between the perturbation equation and Lorentz-Dirac can be seen. However, for electron motion in the classical regime the differences are negligible. For electron motion in the classical regime the first order damping equation is found to be very adequate.

Observation of supercontinuum generation in the direct simulation of an intense laser pulse propagating in a neutral gas.

The propagation of high power short pulse laser pulses in neutral gases is a surprisingly complex phenomenon. In order to study the detailed propagation dynamics a code has been developed which explicitly solves Maxwell's equations including the finite response time background neutral gas polarization and optical field ionization. In large scale two dimensional simulations of a high power laser pulse propagating in hydrogen-like gas the generation of ultrabroadband white light, the so-called supercontinuum generation, is observed.

Direct electron acceleration by stochastic laser fields in the presence of self-generated magnetic fields.

A simple direct acceleration model is proposed, taking into account the stochastic phase disturbance of the coherent driving laser fields. A relativistic single particle simulation shows that plasma electrons are efficiently accelerated far above the ponderomotive energy. The energy and momentum distributions of the accelerated electrons are derived to examine the effects of the self-generated magnetic field on the characteristics of the electron beams. In addition to the beam collimation effect, the magnetic field is found to further enhance the electron acceleration, resulting in the generation of ultrahigh energy electrons.