Nonlinear spatiotemporal control of laser intensity

Abstract

Spatiotemporal control over the intensity of a laser pulse has the potential to enable or revolutionize a wide range of laser-based applications that currently suffer from the poor flexibility offered by conventional optics. Specifically, these optics limit the region of high intensity to the Rayleigh range and provide little to no control over the trajectory of the peak intensity. Here, we introduce a nonlinear technique for spatiotemporal control, the "self-flying focus," that produces an arbitrary trajectory intensity peak that can be sustained for distances comparable to the focal length. The technique combines temporal pulse shaping and the inherent nonlinearity of a medium to customize the time and location at which each temporal slice within the pulse comes to its focus. As an example of its utility, simulations show that the self-flying focus can form a highly uniform, meter-scale plasma suitable for advanced plasma-based accelerators.

References in corpus (6)

• Bright Coherent Ultrahigh Harmonics in the keV X-Ray Regime from Mid-Infrared Femtosecond Lasers
• Phase-Matched Generation of Coherent Soft-X-Rays
• Experimental observation of plasma wakefield growth driven by the seeded self-modulation of a proton bunch
• Photon Acceleration in a Flying Focus
• Ionization waves of arbitrary velocity driven by a flying focus
• Vacuum acceleration of electrons in a dynamic laser pulse

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Spatiotemporal control of laser intensity through cross-phase modulation
• Nonlinear Thomson scattering with ponderomotive control
• Arbitrarily Structured Laser Pulses
• Exact solutions for the electromagnetic fields of a flying focus
• Optical Shock-Enhanced Self-Photon Acceleration
• Signatures of vacuum birefringence in low-power flying focus pulses
• Charged particle beam transport in a flying focus pulse with orbital angular momentum
• Enhanced quantum radiation with flying-focus laser pulses
• Flying focus with arbitrary directionality for spatiotemporal control of laser pulses