Manipulating ultraintense laser pulses in plasmas

An efficient way for manipulating ultraintense laser pulses in plasmas using resonant three-wave interactions is proposed. Poor quality ultraintense laser pulses can be efficiently transformed into high quality focused laser pulses, while the entropy is taken up by resonant plasma waves. This can be accomplished within plasma layers thin enough that parasitic scatterings and instabilities of laser pulses do not have enough time to develop. Combined with laser pulse compression in plasmas, this scheme, using, for example, the lasers that power the National Ignition Facility (see, for instance, the NIF project website: http://www.llnl.gov/nif/project), is potentially capable of producing vacuum breakdown intensities.

[1]  Julian Schwinger,et al.  On gauge invariance and vacuum polarization , 1951 .

[2]  Vladimir M. Malkin,et al.  Generation of ultrahigh intensity laser pulses , 2003 .

[3]  N. Fisch,et al.  Robustness of laser phase fronts in backward Raman amplifiers , 2002 .

[4]  James F. Scott,et al.  The Physics of Ferroelectric Memories , 1998 .

[5]  G. Mourou,et al.  Zettawatt-exawatt lasers and their applications in ultrastrong-field physics , 2002 .

[6]  Toshiki Tajima,et al.  Light intensification towards the Schwinger limit. , 2003, Physical review letters.

[7]  Gennady Shvets,et al.  Ultra-powerful compact amplifiers for short laser pulses , 2000 .

[8]  N. Fisch,et al.  Random density inhomogeneities and focusability of the output pulses for plasma-based powerful backward Raman amplifiers , 2003 .

[9]  Toshiki Tajima,et al.  Erratum: Light Intensification towards the Schwinger Limit [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 , 085001 (2003)] , 2004 .

[10]  Gennady Shvets,et al.  FAST COMPRESSION OF LASER BEAMS TO HIGHLY OVERCRITICAL POWERS , 1999 .

[11]  Michael D. Perry,et al.  Ignition and high gain with ultrapowerful lasers , 1994 .

[12]  H T Powell,et al.  Petawatt laser pulses. , 1999, Optics letters.

[13]  D. N. Hill,et al.  Suppression of MHD fluctuations leading to improved confinement in a gun-driven spheromak. , 2002, Physical review letters.

[14]  N. Fisch,et al.  Simulations of Raman laser amplification in ionizing plasmas , 2003 .

[15]  N. Fisch,et al.  Backward Raman amplification of ionizing laser pulses , 2001 .