No Arabic abstract
A chirped laser pulse focused by a chromatic lens exhibits a dynamic, or flying, focus in which the trajectory of the peak intensity decouples from the group velocity. In a medium, the flying focus can trigger an ionization front that follows this trajectory. By adjusting the chirp, the ionization front can be made to travel at an arbitrary velocity along the optical axis. We present analytical calculations and simulations describing the propagation of the flying focus pulse, the self-similar form of its intensity profile, and ionization wave formation. The ability to control the speed of the ionization wave and, in conjunction, mitigate plasma refraction has the potential to advance several laser-based applications, including Raman amplification, photon acceleration, high harmonic generation, and THz generation.
A high-intensity laser pulse propagating through a medium triggers an ionization front that can accelerate and frequency-upshift the photons of a second pulse. The maximum upshift is ultimately limited by the accelerated photons outpacing the ionization front or the ionizing pulse refracting from the plasma. Here we apply the flying focus--a moving focal point resulting from a chirped laser pulse focused by a chromatic lens--to overcome these limitations. Theory and simulations demonstrate that the ionization front produced by a flying focus can frequency-upshift an ultrashort optical pulse to the extreme ultraviolet over a centimeter of propagation. An analytic model of the upshift predicts that this scheme could be scaled to a novel table-top source of spatially coherent x-rays.
A novel regime of self-compression is proposed for plasma-based backward Raman amplification(BRA) upon flying focus. By using a pumping focus moving with a speed equal to the group velocity of stimulated Raman backscattering(SRBS), only a short part of SRBS which does always synchronize with the flying focus can be amplified. Due to the asymmetrical amplification, the pulse can be directly compressed in the linear stage of BRA. Therefore, instead of a short pulse, the Raman spontaneous or a long pulse can seed the BRA amplifiers. The regime is supported by the 2D particle-in-cell(PIC) simulation without a seed, presenting that the pump pulse is compressed from 26ps to 116fs, with an output amplitude comparable with the case of a well-synchronized short seed. This method provides a significant way to simplify the Raman amplifiers and overcome the issue of synchronization jitter between the pump and the seed.
We propose a new method for self-injection of high-quality electron bunches in the plasma wakefield structure in the blowout regime utilizing a flying focus produced by a drive-beam with an energy-chirp. In a flying focus the speed of the density centroid of the drive bunch can be superluminal or subluminal by utilizing the chromatic dependence of the focusing optics. We first derive the focal velocity and the characteristic length of the focal spot in terms of the focal length and an energy chirp. We then demonstrate using multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations that a wake driven by a superluminally propagating flying focus of an electron beam can generate GeV-level electron bunches with ultra-low normalized slice emittance ($sim$30 nm rad), high current ($sim$ 17 kA), low slice energy-spread ($sim$0.1%) and therefore high normalized brightness ($>10^{19}$ A/rad$^2$/m$^2$) in a plasma of density $sim10^{19}$ cm$^{-3}$. The injection process is highly controllable and tunable by changing the focal velocity and shaping the drive beam current. Near-term experiments using the new FACET II beam could potentially produce beams with brightness exceeding $10^{20}$ A/rad$^2$/m$^2$.
We demonstrate the generation of self-accelerating surface plasmon beams along arbitrary caustic curvatures. These plasmonic beams are excited by free-space beams through a two-dimensional binary plasmonic phase mask, which provides the missing momentum between the two beams in the direction of propagation, and sets the required phase for the plasmonic beam in the transverse direction. We examine the cases of paraxial and non-paraxial curvatures and show that this highly versatile scheme can be designed to produce arbitrary plasmonic self-accelerating beams. Several different plasmonic beams, which accelerate along polynomial and exponential trajectories, are demonstrated both numerically and experimentally, with a direct measurement of the plasmonic light intensity using a near-field-scanning-optical-microscope.
We develop a coherent beam splitter for single electrons driven through two tunnel-coupled quantum wires by surface acoustic waves (SAWs). The output current through each wire oscillates with gate voltages to tune the tunnel-coupling and potential difference between the wires. This oscillation is assigned to coherent electron tunneling motion that can be used to encode a flying qubit and is well reproduced by numerical calculations of time evolution of the SAW-driven single electrons. The oscillation visibility is currently limited to about 3%, but robust against decoherence, indicating that the SAW-electron can serve as a novel platform for a solid-state flying qubit.