No Arabic abstract
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.
The production of polarized proton beams with multi-GeV energies in ultra-intense laser interaction with targets is studied with three-dimensional Particle-In-Cell simulations. A near-critical density plasma target with pre-polarized proton and tritium ions is considered for the proton acceleration. The pre-polarized protons are initially accelerated by laser radiation pressure before injection and further acceleration in a bubble-like wakefield. The temporal dynamics of proton polarization is tracked via the T-BMT equation, and it is found that the proton polarization state can be altered both by the laser field and the magnetic component of the wakefield. The dependence of the proton acceleration and polarization on the ratio of the ion species is determined, and it is found that the protons can be efficiently accelerated as long as their relative fraction is less than 20%, in which case the bubble size is large enough for the protons to obtain sufficient energy to overcome the bubble injection threshold.
Laser-driven collisonless electrostatic shock formation and the subsequent ion acceleration have been studied in near critical density plasmas. Particle-in-cell simulations show that both the speed of laser-driven collisionless electrostatic shock and the energies of shock-accelerated ions can be greatly enhanced due to fast laser propagation in near critical density plasmas. However, a response time longer than tens of laser wave cycles is required before the shock formation in a near critical density plasma, in contrast to the quick shock formation in a highly overdense target. More important, we find that some ions can be reflected by the collisionless shock even if the electrostatic potential jump across the shock is smaller than the ion kinetic energy in the shock frame, which seems against the conventional ion-reflection condition. These anomalous ion reflections are attributed to the strongly time-oscillating electric field accompanying laser-driven collisionless shock in a near critical density plasma.
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.
We observe that high-Q electromagnetic cavity resonances increase the cyclotron cooling rate of pure electron plasmas held in a Penning-Malmberg trap when the electron cyclotron frequency, controlled by tuning the magnetic field, matches the frequency of standing wave modes in the cavity. For certain modes and trapping configurations, this can increase the cooling rate by factors of ten or more. In this paper, we investigate the variation of the cooling rate and equilibrium plasma temperatures over a wide range of parameters, including the plasma density, plasma position, electron number, and magnetic field.
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.