No Arabic abstract
The interaction of high-intensity laser pulses and solid targets provides a promising way to create compact, tunable and bright XUV attosecond sources that can become a unique tool for a variety of applications. However, it is important to control the polarization state of this XUV radiation, and to do so in the most efficient regime of generation. Using the relativistic electronic spring (RES) model and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, we show that the polarization state of the generated attosecond pulses can be tuned in a wide range of parameters by adjusting the polarization and angle of incidence of the laser radiation. In particular, we demonstrate the possibility of producing circularly polarized attosecond pulses in a wide variety of setups.
Observations of the interaction of an intense {lambda}0 approx 10 {mu}m laser pulse with near-critical overdense plasmas (ne = 1.8 - 3 nc) are presented. For the first time, transverse optical probing is used to show a recession of the front surface caused by radiation pressure driven hole-boring by the laser pulse with an initial velocity > 10^6 ms-1, and the resulting collisionless shocks. The collisionless shock propagates through the plasma, dissipates into an ion-acoustic solitary wave, and eventually becomes collisional as it slows further. These conclusions are supported by PIC simulations which show that the initial evolution is dominated by collisionless mechanisms.
Adapting a plane hydrodynamical model we briefly revisit the study of the impact of a very short and intense laser pulse onto a diluted plasma, the formation of a plasma wave, its wave-breaking, the occurrence of the slingshot effect.
The microscopic dynamics of laser-driven coherent synchrotron emission transmitted through thin foils are investigated using particle-in-cell simulations. For normal incidence interactions, we identify the formation of two distinct electron nanobunches from which emission takes place each half-cycle of the driving laser pulse. These emissions are separated temporally by 130 attoseconds and are dominant in different frequency ranges, which is a direct consequence of the distinct characteristics of each electron nanobunch. This may be exploited through spectral filtering to isolate these emissions, generating electromagnetic pulses of duration ~70 as.
The interaction of dense plasmas with an intense laser under a strong external magnetic field has been investigated. When the cyclotron frequency for the ambient magnetic field is higher than the laser frequency, the lasers electromagnetic field is converted to the whistler mode that propagates along the field line. Because of the nature of the whistler wave, the laser light penetrates into dense plasmas with no cutoff density, and produces superthermal electrons through cyclotron resonance. It is found that the cyclotron resonance absorption occurs effectively under the broadened conditions, or a wider range of the external field, which is caused by the presence of relativistic electrons accelerated by the laser field. The upper limit of the ambient field for the resonance increases in proportion to the square root of the relativistic laser intensity. The propagation of a large-amplitude whistler wave could raise the possibility for plasma heating and particle acceleration deep inside dense plasmas.
Laser-plasma electron accelerators can be used to produce high-intensity X-rays, as electrons accelerated in wakefields emit radiation due to betatron oscillations.Such X-ray sources inherit the features of the electron beam; sub-femtosecond electron bunches produce betatron sources of the same duration, which in turn allow probing matter on ultrashort time scales. In this paper we show, via Particle-in-Cell simulations, that attosecond electron bunches can be obtained using low-energy, ultra-short laser beams both in the self-injection and the controlled injection regimes at low plasma densities. However, only in the controlled regime does the electron injection lead to a stable, isolated attosecond electron bunch. Such ultrashort electron bunches are shown to emit attosecond X-ray bursts with high brilliance