No Arabic abstract
The propagation of a superintense laser pulse in an underdense, inhomogeneous plasma has been studied numerically by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations on a time scale extending up to several picoseconds. The effects of the ion dynamics following the charge-displacement self-channeling of the laser pulse have been addressed. Radial ion acceleration leads to the ``breaking of the plasma channel walls, causing an inversion of the radial space-charge field and the filamentation of the laser pulse. At later times a number of long-lived, quasi-periodic field structures are observed and their dynamics is characterized with high resolution. Inside the plasma channel, a pattern of electric and magnetic fields resembling both soliton- and vortex-like structures is observed.
The dynamics of magnetic fields with amplitude of several tens of Megagauss, generated at both sides of a solid target irradiated with a high intensity (? 1019W/cm2) picosecond laser pulse, has been spatially and temporally resolved using a proton imaging technique. The amplitude of the magnetic fields is sufficiently large to have a constraining effect on the radial expansion of the plasma sheath at the target surfaces. These results, supported by numerical simulations and simple analytical modeling, may have implications for ion acceleration driven by the plasma sheath at the rear side of the target as well as for the laboratory study of self-collimated high-energy plasma jets.
Dynamics of self-injected electron bunches has been numerically simulated in blowout regime at self-consistent change of electron bunch acceleration by plasma wakefield, excited by a laser pulse, to additional their acceleration by wakefield, excited by self-injected bunch. Advantages of acceleration by pulse train and bunch self-cleaning have been considered.
A theoretical investigation of the ultrafast processes and dynamics of the excited carriers upon irradiation of GaAs with femtosecond (fs) pulsed lasers is performed in conditions that induce material damage and eventually surface modification of the heated solid. A parametric study is followed to correlate the produced transient carrier density with the damage threshold for various pulse duration values {tau}p (it increases as ~ at relatively small values of {tau}p while it drops for pulse durations of the order of some picoseconds) based on the investigation of the fundamental multiscale physical processes following fs-laser irradiation. Moreover, fluence values for which the originally semiconducting material demonstrates a metallic behaviour are estimated. It is shown that a sufficient number of carriers in the conduction band are produced to excite Surface Plasmon (SP) waves that upon coupling with the incident beam and a fluid-based surface modification mechanism lead to the formation of sub-wavelength periodic structures orientated perpendicularly to the laser beam polarization. Experimental results for the damage threshold and the frequencies of induced periodic structures show a good agreement with the theoretical predictions.
The accelerating gradients in conventional linear accelerators are currently limited to 100 MV per meter. Plasma-based accelerators have the ability to sustain accelerating gradients which are several orders of magnitude greater than that obtained in conventionalaccelerators. Due to the rapid development of laser technology the laser-plasma-based accelerators are of great interest now. Over the past decade, successful experiments on laser wakefield acceleration of electrons in the plasma have confirmed the relevance of this acceleration. Evidently, the large accelerating gradients in the laser plasma accelerators allow to reduce the size and to cut the cost of accelerators. Another important advantage of the laser-plasma accelerators is that they can produce short electron bunches with high energy.
We study the ionization dynamics in intense laser-droplet interaction using three-dimensional, relativistic particle-in-cell simulations. Of particular interest is the laser intensity and frequency regime for which initially transparent, wavelength-sized targets are not homogeneously ionized. Instead, the charge distribution changes both in space and in time on a sub-cycle scale. One may call this the extreme nonlinear Mie-optics regime. We find that - despite the fact that the plasma created at the droplet surface is overdense - oscillating electric fields may penetrate into the droplet under a certain angle, ionize, and propagate in the just generated plasma. This effect can be attributed to the local field enhancements at the droplet surface predicted by standard Mie theory. The penetration of the fields into the droplet leads to the formation of a highly inhomogeneous charge density distribution in the droplet interior, concentrated mostly in the polarization plane. We present a self-similar, exponential fit of the fractional ionization degree which depends only on a dimensionless combination of electric field amplitude, droplet radius, and plasma frequency with only a weak dependence on the laser frequency in the overdense regime.