Relativistic Tennis with Photons: Demonstration of Frequency Upshifting by a Relativistic Flying Mirror through Two Colliding Laser Pulses

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel method of frequency upshifting and pulse compression using relativistic flying mirrors created by plasma wake waves driven by high-power lasers, enabling extreme light intensification.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental demonstration of frequency multiplication via reflection from relativistic plasma mirrors in laser wakefields.

Findings

Successful detection of frequency upshifting in helium plasma

Generation of extremely compressed, coherent X-ray pulses

Potential to reach Schwinger field intensities

Abstract

Since the advent of chirped pulse amplification1 the peak power of lasers has grown dramatically and opened the new branch of high field science, delivering the focused irradiance, electric fields of which drive electrons into the relativistic regime. In a plasma wake wave generated by such a laser, modulations of the electron density naturally and robustly take the shape of paraboloidal dense shells, separated by evacuated regions, moving almost at the speed of light. When we inject another counter-propagating laser pulse, it is partially reflected from the shells, acting as relativistic flying (semi-transparent) mirrors, producing an extremely time-compressed frequency-multiplied pulse which may be focused tightly to the diffraction limit. This is as if the counterstreaming laser pulse bounces off a relativistically swung tennis racket, turning the ball of the laser photons into another ball of coherent X-ray photons but with a form extremely relativistically compressed to attosecond and zeptosecond levels. Here we report the first demonstration of the frequency multiplication detected from the reflection of a weak laser pulse in the region of the wake wave generated by the driver pulse in helium plasma. This leads to the possibility of very strong pulse compression and extreme coherent light intensification. This Relativistic Tennis with photon beams is demonstrated leading to the possibility toward reaching enormous electromagnetic field intensification and finally approaching the Schwinger field, toward which the vacuum nonlinearly warps and eventually breaks, producing electron-positron pairs.