A Review of Laser Guiding Experiments

In many cases the length over which particles can be accelerated in a laser‐driven plasma accelerator is limited by refraction or diffraction of the driving laser pulse. In order to overcome this limitation the driving pulse must be guided or channeled through the plasma. In this paper we briefly review of the techniques used to guide laser pulses with peak intensities up to 1019 W cm−2, and describe recent experimental results.