Electron heating in subpicosecond laser interaction with overdense and near-critical plasmas

Dense Helical Electron Bunch Generation in Near-Critical Density Plasmas with Ultrarelativistic Laser Intensities

The mechanism for emergence of helical electron bunch(HEB) from an ultrarelativistic circularly polarized laser pulse propagating in near-critical density(NCD) plasma is investigated. Self-consistent three-dimensional(3D) Particle-in-Cell(PIC) simulations are performed to model all aspects of the laser plasma interaction including laser pulse evolution, electron and ion motions. At a laser inte...

Study of Laser-Hole Boring into Overdense Plasmas.

Laser System for a Subpicosecond Electron Linac

At the Argonne Chemistry Division efforts are underway to develop a sub-picosecond electron beam pulse radiolysis facility for chemical studies. The target output of the accelerator is to generate electron pulses that can be adjusted from 3nC in .6ps to 100nC in 45ps. In conjunction with development of the accelerator a stateof-the-art ultrafast laser system is under construction that will driv...

Synchronization of femtosecond laser and electron pulses with subpicosecond precision

The temporal evolution of electron shadow images, formed by the projection of primary femtosecond electron pulses probe over a metal target and perturbed by the transient space-charge field near the target surface induced by the excitation of femtosecond optical pulses pump , is recorded in real time. By quantitatively analyzing the evolution of these shadow images as a function of pump-probe d...

Picosecond soft x ray source from subpicosecond laser produced plasmas

Short pulse high intensity laser plasma interactions are investigated experimentally with temporally and spectrally resolved soft x ray diagnostics We demonstrate that the pulse width of the laser produced x rays emitted from solid targets may be varied down to the picosecond time scale by adjusting the incident laser ux Bright picosecond broadband emission characteristic of a short scale lengt...