Plasma-Based Generation and Control of a Single Few-Cycle High-Energy Ultrahigh-Intensity Laser Pulse

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using a heavy, slow foil in laser interactions can generate and control single few-cycle, ultra-high-energy laser pulses with peak intensities over 10^23 W/cm^2, advancing ultrahigh-intensity laser technology.

Contribution

It reveals that a heavy foil can more effectively generate ultrahigh-intensity, few-cycle laser pulses than a light one, and shows how to generate and tune such pulses with next-generation lasers.

Findings

Heavy foils improve reflectivity and pulse generation efficiency.

Few-cycle pulses can be amplified and shortened further.

Generated pulses exceed 10^23 W/cm^2 peak intensity.

Abstract

A laser-boosted relativistic solid-density paraboloidal foil is known to efficiently reflect and focus a counterpropagating laser pulse. Here we show that in the case of an ultrarelativistic counterpropagating pulse, a high-energy and ultrahigh intensity reflected pulse can be more effectively generated by a relatively slow and heavy foil than by a fast and light one. This counterintuitive result is explained with the larger reflectivity of a heavy foil, which compensates for its lower relativistic Doppler factor. Moreover, since the counterpropagating pulse is ultrarelativistic, the foil is abruptly dispersed and only the first few cycles of the counterpropagating pulse are reflected. Our multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that even few-cycle counterpropagating laser pulses can be further shortened (both temporally and in the number of laser cycles) with pulse amplification. A single few-cycle, multi-petawatt laser pulse with several joule of energy and with peak intensity exceeding 10^23 W/cm^2 can be generated already employing next-generation high-power laser systems. In addition, the carrier-envelope phase of the generated few-cycle pulse can be tuned provided that the carrier-envelope phase of the initial counterpropagating pulse is controlled.