Electron acceleration in vacuum by subcycle laser pulse

Abstract

An analytical expression based on the paraxial approximation describing the propagation of a subcycle axicon Gaussian laser pulse in vacuum is obtained. The broad spectrum of the ultrashort pulse is given in terms of a Taylor series in the main wave frequency. The spatial and temporal characteristics of the pulse are strongly coupled. The model is used to consider electron acceleration by the light pressure of an intense subcycle laser pulse. The pulse model can also be applied to other short pulse profiles.

Proton acceleration by radially polarized chirped laser pulses

“…We start by calculating the field structure of a tightly focused chirped RP laser pulse. It is well known that the laser pulse fields can be expressed generally by [16,[23][24][25]…”

“…Recently, it is proposed to accelerate charged particles especially electrons in vacuum by radially polarized (RP) intense laser beams. This kind of laser beams can accelerate electrons along the beam axis by its strong longitudinal electric field and meanwhile confine them by its transverse electric and magnetic fields [14][15][16][17][18]. A RP laser pulse can be focused to the order of a laser wavelength, which significantly increases the longitudinal electric field at focus [19,20].…”

“…In this paper, a new solution for tightly focused chirped RP laser pulse is presented based on plane-wave angular spectrum analysis (ASA) [17,18,23,24] and the Taylor expansion [16,[23][24][25]. Using our new solution, we investigate proton acceleration by this kind of RP laser pulses with peak intensity around 10 22 W=cm 2 .…”

Charge motion under ultrafast harmonic wave switching

“…+ sin (ωt off + φ CE ) + ζ off cos (ωt off + φ CE ) , (12) where the charge velocity before the pulse arrival has been set to zero.…”

“…Half cycle pulses have been used to probe and ionize wave packets in atomic systems [6,7,8]. Electron acceleration in vacuum with harmonic electromagnetic fields under different regimes has been predicted and demonstrated [9,10,11,12]. Precise understanding and control of the carrier envelope phase in few cycle pulses is important for diverse purposes such as attosecond metrology and spectroscopy [13], coherent control of molecular and charge dynamics as well as ultrafast nonlinear optics.…”