A new method of optical guidance by the implosion phase of a fast Z-pinch discharge in a gas-filled capillary is proposed. An imploding plasma column has a concave electron-density profile in the radial direction, just before a stagnation phase driven by a converging current sheet and a shock wave. The feasibility of optical guidance of a high-intensity (>1 x 10(17) W/cm(2)) Ti:sapphire laser pulse by use of this method over a distance of 2 cm, corresponding to 12.5 times the Rayleigh length, has been experimentally demonstrated. The guiding-channel formation process was directly probed with a He-Ne laser beam. The electron density in the fully ionized channel was estimated to be 2.0 x 10(17) cm(-3) on the axis and 7.0 x 10(17) cm(-3) on the peaks of the channel edge, with a diameter of 70 mum, as indicated by the experimental results, which were corroborated by a magnetohydrodynamics simulation.

An explanation is given for the fixed blueshift observed of an intense short pulse laser propagating in a gas chamber filled with helium. The observed shift is found to be independent of the laser power and gas pressure above some critical power. The results are explained by the formation of filaments, which occur due to nonlinear gas polarization effects. The blueshift is in qualitative agreement with a one dimensional particle-in-cell simulation including ionization of the gas.

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A new semianalytical method of investigating the beam dynamics for electron injectors was developed. In this method, a short bunched electron beam is assumed to be an ensemble of several segmentation pieces in both the longitudinal and the transverse directions. The trajectory of each electron in the segmentation pieces is solved by the beam envelope equations while taking into account the space charge fields produced by all the pieces, the electromagnetic fields of an rf cavity, and the image charge fields at a cathode surface. The shape of the entire bunch is consequently calculated, and thus the emittances can be obtained from weighted mean values of the solutions for the obtained electron trajectories. The advantage of this method is its unique assumption for the beam parameters. We assume that each segmentation slice is not warped in the calculations. Although if the beam energy is low and the charge density is large, this condition is not satisfied, in practice, this condition is usually satisfied. We have performed beam dynamics calculations to obtain traces in free space and in the BNL-type rf gun cavity by comparing the analytical solutions with those obtained by simulation. In most cases, the emittances obtained by the simulation become closer to those obtained analytically with increasing the number of particles used in the simulation. Therefore, the analytically obtained emittances are expected to coincide with converged values obtained by the simulation. The applicable range of the analytical method for the BNL-type rf gun cavity is under 0.5 nC per bunch. This range is often used in recently built x-ray free electron laser facilities.