Laser Compression via fast-extending plasma gratings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel laser pulse compression technique using fast-extending plasma gratings created by ionizing hypersound waves, achieving significant pulse shortening with high efficiency and robustness.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new method of laser pulse compression utilizing fast-extending plasma gratings generated by ionizing hypersound waves, supported by kinetic PIC simulations.

Findings

Pulse compressed from 13ps to 7.2fs

Compression efficiency close to 80%

Robustness to plasma instabilities

Abstract

It is proposed a new method of compressing laser pulse by fast extending plasma gratings(FEPG), which is created by ionizing the hypersound wave generated by stimulated Brillouin scattering(SBS) in the background gas. Ionized by a short laser pulse, the phonon forms a light-velocity FEPG to fully reflect a resonant pump laser. As the reflecting surface moves with a light velocity, the reflected pulse is temporally overlapped and compressed. This regime is supported by the simulation results of a fully kinetic particle-in-cell(PIC) code Opic with a laser wavelength of 1um, displaying a pump pulse is compressed from 13ps to a few cycles(7.2fs), with an efficiency close to 80%. It is a promising method to produce critical laser powers due to several features: high efficiency without a linear stage, robustness to plasma instabilities, no seed and a wide range of pump intensity.