TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of transient plasma photonic structures in plasma-based amplifiers
AU - Vieux, Grégory
AU - Cipiccia, Silvia
AU - Welsh, Gregor H.
AU - Yoffe, Samuel R.
AU - Gärtner, Felix
AU - Tooley, Matthew P.
AU - Ersfeld, Bernhard
AU - Brunetti, Enrico
AU - Eliasson, Bengt
AU - Picken, Craig
AU - McKendrick, Graeme
AU - Hur, MinSup
AU - Dias, João M.
AU - Kühl, Thomas
AU - Lehmann, Götz
AU - Jaroszynski, Dino A.
N1 - KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2023-01-18
Acknowledgements: We acknowledge the support of the UK EPSRC (EP/J018171/1 and EP/N028694/1), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 871124 Laserlab-Europe. B.El. acknowledges support from the EPSRC (UK), grant EP/M009386/1. We would like to extend our thanks to the staff at the CLF for their valuable help. Also, the authors would like to thank the OSIRIS consortium (UCLA/IST) for the use of OSIRIS. 1D simulation results have been obtained using the EPSRC-funded ARCHIE-WeSt High-Performance Computer (www.archie-west.ac.uk). For the 2D simulation results, this research used the resources of the Supercomputing Laboratory at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. This work also used the ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service (https://www.archer2.ac.uk).
This publication acknowledges KAUST support, but has no KAUST affiliated authors.
PY - 2023/1/13
Y1 - 2023/1/13
N2 - High power lasers have become useful scientific tools, but their large size is determined by their low damage-threshold optical media. A more robust and compact medium for amplifying and manipulating intense laser pulses is plasma. Here we demonstrate, experimentally and through simulations, that few-millijoule, ultra-short seed pulses interacting with 3.5-J counter-propagating pump pulses in plasma, stimulate back-scattering of nearly 100 mJ pump energy with high intrinsic efficiency, when detuned from Raman resonance. This is due to scattering off a plasma Bragg grating formed by ballistically evolving ions. Electrons are bunched by the ponderomotive force of the beat-wave, which produces space-charge fields that impart phase correlated momenta to ions. They inertially evolve into a volume Bragg grating that backscatters a segment of the pump pulse. This, ultra-compact, two-step, inertial bunching mechanism can be used to manipulate and compress intense laser pulses. We also observe stimulated Compton (kinetic) and Raman backscattering.
AB - High power lasers have become useful scientific tools, but their large size is determined by their low damage-threshold optical media. A more robust and compact medium for amplifying and manipulating intense laser pulses is plasma. Here we demonstrate, experimentally and through simulations, that few-millijoule, ultra-short seed pulses interacting with 3.5-J counter-propagating pump pulses in plasma, stimulate back-scattering of nearly 100 mJ pump energy with high intrinsic efficiency, when detuned from Raman resonance. This is due to scattering off a plasma Bragg grating formed by ballistically evolving ions. Electrons are bunched by the ponderomotive force of the beat-wave, which produces space-charge fields that impart phase correlated momenta to ions. They inertially evolve into a volume Bragg grating that backscatters a segment of the pump pulse. This, ultra-compact, two-step, inertial bunching mechanism can be used to manipulate and compress intense laser pulses. We also observe stimulated Compton (kinetic) and Raman backscattering.
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10754/687129
UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-022-01109-5
U2 - 10.1038/s42005-022-01109-5
DO - 10.1038/s42005-022-01109-5
M3 - Article
SN - 2399-3650
VL - 6
JO - Communications Physics
JF - Communications Physics
IS - 1
ER -