Laser-plasma accelerators of only a centimetre’s length have produced nearly monoenergetic electron bunches with energy as high as 1 GeV. Scaling these compact accelerators to multi-gigaelectronvolt energy would open the prospect of building X-ray free-electron lasers and linear colliders hundreds of times smaller than conventional facilities, but the 1 GeV barrier has so far proven insurmountable. Here, by applying new petawatt laser technology, we produce electron bunches with a spectrum prominently peaked at 2 GeV with only a few per cent energy spread and unprecedented sub-milliradian divergence. Petawatt pulses inject ambient plasma electrons into the laser-driven accelerator at much lower density than was previously possible, thereby overcoming the principal physical barriers to multi-gigaelectronvolt acceleration: dephasing between laser-driven wake and accelerating electrons and laser pulse erosion. Simulations indicate that with improvements in the laser-pulse focus quality, acceleration to nearly 10 GeV should be possible with the available pulse energy.

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We observe multiple excitonic optical Rabi oscillations in a semiconductor quantum well. Up to eight oscillation periods of the heavy-hole exciton density on a subpicosecond time scale are observed. An approximate linear dependence of the oscillation frequency on the light field amplitude is established. The experiment is based on a two-color detection scheme which allows for the observation of the heavy-hole exciton density via transmission changes at the light-hole exciton. The observations are in good agreement with theoretical computations based on multiband semiconductor Bloch equations.[S0031-9007(99)08665-2]

We report results of new pair creation experiments using ~100 Joule pulses of the Texas Petawatt Laser to irradiate solid gold and platinum targets, with intensities up to ~1.9 × 1021 W.cm−2 and pulse durations as short as ~130 fs. Positron to electron (e+/e−) ratios >15% were observed for many thick disk and rod targets, with the highest e+/e− ratio reaching ~50% for a Pt rod. The inferred pair yield was ~ few ×1010 with emerging pair density reaching ~1015/cm3 so that the pair skin depth becomes < pair jet transverse size. These results represent major milestones towards the goal of creating a significant quantity of dense pair-dominated plasmas with e+/e− approaching 100% and pair skin depth ≪ pair plasma size, which will have wide-ranging applications to astrophysics and fundamental physics.