Plasma photonic structures for high power laser beam transport systems
The next generation of ultra-high-power, ultra-short-pulse lasers, which are now approaching exawatts peak powers, will be huge because of the relatively low damage-threshold optical media of their beam delivery systems. A robust medium for manipulating intense laser pulses is plasma, because it is fully ionized. Plasma Bragg gratings can be formed by ballistically evolving ions, which have gained momentum from the space-charge fields of electron density modulations created by the ponderomotive force of the beat wave of intercepting counter-propagating "pump" laser pulses. The space-charge fields impart phase correlated momenta to ions, which then form a plasma photonic structure that can efficiently scatter probe pulses incident on them. This two-step, inertial bunching mechanism can be used to create robust media for manipulate intense laser pulses. We show experimentally that intense ultrashort pulses can scattering off plasma photonic structures with high intrinsic efficiency and present the latest experimental results where we demonstrate several properties of plasma photonic structures, and compare observations with numerical simulations. We show that the plasma photonic structure is birefringent, and can act as a lens, a high efficiency mirror and an amplifier.
Authors
- J. M. Dias (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0167-1466)
- Nicolas Bourgeois (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5404-1260)
- B. Ramakrishna (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2728-6809)
- G. Lehmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2502-6210)
- G. Vieux (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4040-4117)
- George K. Holt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6814-9117)
- Silvia Cipiccia (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3485-2856)
- Antoine Maitrallain (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1362-5777)
- Samuel R. Yoffe (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6723-4990)
- Willow Pring
- James S. Feehan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9557-5215)
- Andrzej Kornaszewski
- Bernhard Ersfeld (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5597-9429)
- Rajeev Pattathil
- S. Krishnamurthy (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-0517)
- Sanjeev Kumar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8082-0003)
- D. A. Jaroszynski (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3006-5492)
- Adam Noble (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8181-7076)
- Feng Dong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7979-5464)
- С. А. Иванов (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2329-2571)
- Enrico Brunetti
- Daniel Symes
- MinSup Hur
- Mohammed Shahzad
- Bengt Elliasson
Institutions
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (GB)
- University of Strathclyde (GB)
- Universidade Politécnica de Lisboa (PT)
- Instituto Superior Autónomo de Estudos Politécnicos (PT)
- Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (DE)
- University College London (GB)
- Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (KR)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-06-06
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3060130
- Primary Topic
- Laser Design and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00