Surface plasmons in superintense laser-solid interactions

TL;DR

This paper reviews how superintense laser interactions with solid targets generate surface plasmons, influencing plasma instabilities, enhancing secondary emissions, and enabling new high-field plasmonic applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of surface plasmon phenomena in relativistic laser-solid interactions, highlighting experimental evidence and potential applications in high-field plasmonics.

Findings

Evidence of surface plasmons in nonlinear relativistic regimes

Enhanced secondary emissions from grating targets due to surface plasmons

Generation of ultrashort unipolar current pulses

Abstract

We review studies of superintense laser interaction with solid targets where the generation of propagating surface plasmons (or surface waves) plays a key role. These studies include the onset of plasma instabilities at the irradiated surface, the enhancement of secondary emissions (protons, electrons, and photons as high harmonics in the XUV range) in femtosecond interactions with grating targets, and the generation of unipolar current pulses with picosecond duration. The experimental results give evidence of the existence of surface plasmons in the nonlinear regime of relativistic electron dynamics. These findings open up a route to the improvement of ultrashort laser-driven sources of energetic radiation and, more in general, to the extension of plasmonics in a high field regime.