Vector wave solutions are obtained for the propagation of beams of light in media having slow spatial variations of the gain, loss, or index of refraction. The formalism developed here is applicable to a wide range of problems, and an exa mple considered in detail is the propagation of off-axis beams in lenslike laser materials and optical waveguides. A procedure is also described for the diagn...

While time-dependent electromagnetic fields using microwave technology have been exploited for decades in acceleration and manipulation of charged particle beams, modern lasers stand poised to be exploited for these purposes with great promise. The advent of compact sub-picosecond terawatt lasers has renewed the interest in phenomena that involve scattering or collective interaction of lasers w...

The existence of spiral-type beams with a predetermined intensity distribution is investigated by theoretical and experimental means. Spiral-type beams with an intensity distribution in the form of an arbitrary planar line were found. A correspondence between these laser beams and a specific quantum-mechanical situation ground states of a charged particle in a uniform magnetic field was found. ...

Temperature profile on a spherical sample that is heated by laser beams in various geometries while processed in vacuum is analyzed. Sample heating by one or four laser beams was considered. An analytical expression was derived for directional sample heating cases. It suggests an enhanced temperature uniformity over the samples when heated with four diffuse laser beams arranged in a tetrahedral...

If a laser beam is to have radial transverse polarization, the transverse electric must vanish on the symmetry axis, which is charge free. However, we can expect a nonzero longitudinal electric field on the axis, considering that the rays of the beam that converge on its focus each has polarization transverse to the ray, and hence the projections of their electric fields onto the axis all have ...

The electric fields produced by the interaction of ultra-short and ultra-intense laser pulses with a thin target make it possible to obtain multiMeV , high density, highly collimated proton and ion beams with duration in the sub-picosecond range. Critical features are the efficiency of the ion acceleration process and the energy spectrum of the produced ion beam. At high laser intensities the r...

Laser-plasma accelerators can produce high-quality electron beams, up to giga electronvolts in energy, from a centimetre scale device. The properties of the electron beams and the accelerator stability are largely determined by the injection stage of electrons into the accelerator. The simplest mechanism of injection is self-injection, in which the wakefield is strong enough to trap cold plasma...

Numerical simulations of the temporal evolution of laser light filamentation and stimulated Brillouin forward scattering (SBFS) in plasmas, under conditions that are relevant to laser fusion, are presented and analyzed. Long term unsteady behavior of filaments is observed to be the norm. Temporal and spatial incoherence due to filamentation and SBFS are impressed upon time-independent incident ...