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Guided propagation of extremely intense lasers in plasma via ion motion

Wei-Min Wang, Zheng-Ming Sheng, Thomas Wilson, Yu-Tong Li, and Jie Zhang
Phys. Rev. E 101, 011201(R) – Published 16 January 2020

Abstract

The upcoming 10100 PW laser facilities may deliver laser pulses with unprecedented intensity of 10221025Wcm2. Such laser pulses interacting with ultrarelativistic electrons accelerated in plasma can trigger various nonlinear quantum electrodynamic processes. Usually, ion motion is expected to be ignorable since the laser intensities below 1025Wcm2 are underrelativistic for ions. Here, we find that ion motion becomes significant even with the intensity around 1022Wcm2 when electron cavitation is formed by the strong laser ponderomotive force. Due to the electron cavitation, guided laser propagation becomes impossible via usual plasma electron response to laser fields. However, we find that ion response to the laser fields may effectively guide laser propagation at such high intensity levels. The corresponding conditions of the required ion density distribution and laser power are presented and verified by three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.

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  • Received 17 July 2019
  • Revised 22 October 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.011201

©2020 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Plasma Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Wei-Min Wang1,2,3,*, Zheng-Ming Sheng2,4,5,†, Thomas Wilson2, Yu-Tong Li3,6,7,‡, and Jie Zhang3,4

  • 1Department of Physics and Beijing Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Functional Materials and Micro-Nano Devices, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
  • 2SUPA, Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G4 0NG, United Kingdom
  • 3Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, CAS, Beijing 100190, China
  • 4Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (MoE) and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
  • 5Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
  • 6School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • 7Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, Guangdong 523808, China

  • *weiminwang1@ruc.edu.cn
  • z.sheng@strath.ac.uk
  • ytli@iphy.ac.cn

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Vol. 101, Iss. 1 — January 2020

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