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Optica Publishing Group
  • Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics
  • OSA Technical Digest (Optica Publishing Group, 2002),
  • paper JTuB3

Distortion-Free Guiding of 0.2 × 1018 W/cm2 Pulses Through a Fully-Ionized 1.5 cm He Plasma Channel

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Abstract

Plasma waveguides capable of guiding relativisti- cally intense fs laser pulses without optical distortion are essential to developing GeV-scale Laser Wakefield (LWF) Accelerators and coherent short-wavelength sources. We report the highest intensity-length product (0.2 × 1018 W/cm2 × 1.5 cm) to date for distortion-free guiding. We generated our channels in a backfill of He gas (500-700 Torr) using a modification of a method developed by Milchberg,1 who line-focused ~100 ps, ~0.3 JNd: YAG laser pulses to intensities of ~ 1013 W/cm2 into a gas using an axicon (Fig. la). This intensity readily field-ionizes high-Z gases (e.g. Ar, N2). thus initiating the channel-forming process, but forms an incompletely-ionized channel, in which relativistically intense pulses suffer ionization-induced phase distortion during guiding and ionization-induced defocusing when entering the channel. Indeed we observe distorted exit mode and spectrum (Fig. lc) and only 5% throughput when we attempt to guide a pulse at >1017 W/cm3 through a nitrogen channel.

© 2002 Optical Society of America

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