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Terahertz radiation from the vacuum-plasma interface driven by ultrashort intense laser pulses

Zheng-Ming Sheng, Hui-Chun Wu, Kun Li, and Jie Zhang
Phys. Rev. E 69, 025401(R) – Published 25 February 2004
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Abstract

Coherent terahertz (THz) emission from the vacuum-plasma interface induced through laser wake-field excitation has been investigated by particle-in-cell simulations. The emission frequency appears around τL1, where τL is the laser pulse duration, even though the plasma density is distributed inhomogeneously near the interface. The emission amplitude, which is zero on the propagation axis of the incident pulse, increases transversely until reaching the maximum amplitude at the beam edge of the incident pulse and then decays transversely. The emission power scales like P108×a04W, where a0 is the normalized field amplitude of the laser pulse. For an incident pulse of a few tens of femtoseconds at the forced intensity of 3×1017W/cm2, it can generate THz radiation with a power of a few MW and with an energy of several μJ/pulse.

  • Received 5 November 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.025401

©2004 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Zheng-Ming Sheng, Hui-Chun Wu, Kun Li, and Jie Zhang

  • Laboratory of Optical Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100080, China

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Issue

Vol. 69, Iss. 2 — February 2004

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