Ambient air plasma acceleration in tightly-focused ultrashort infrared laser beams

Abstract

Recent experimental and theoretical results have demonstrated the possibility of accelerating electrons in the MeV range by focusing tightly a few-cycle laser beam in ambient air. Using Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations, this configuration is revisited within a more accurate modelling approach to analyze and optimize the mechanism responsible for electron acceleration. In particular, an analytical model for a linearly polarized tightly-focused ultrashort laser field is derived and coupled to a PIC code, allowing us to model the interaction of laser beams reflected by high-numerical aperture mirrors with laser-induced plasmas. A set of 3D PIC simulations is performed where the laser wavelength is varied from 800 nm to 7.0 $\mu$m while the normalized amplitude of the electric field is varied from $a_0=3.6$ to $a_0=7.0$. The preferential forward acceleration of electrons, as well as the analysis of the laser intensity evolution in the plasma and data on electron number density, confirm that the relativistic ponderomotive force is responsible for the acceleration. We also demonstrate that the electron kinetic energy reaches a maximum of $\approx 1.6$ MeV when the central wavelength is of 2.5 $\mu$m.

16 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regime
• High-charge 10 GeV electron acceleration in a 10 cm nanoparticle-assisted hybrid wakefield accelerator
• Novel Aspects of Direct Laser Acceleration of Relativistic Electrons
• Electron acceleration driven by ultrashort and nonparaxial radially polarized laser pulses
• Direct laser acceleration in underdense plasmas with multi-PW lasers: a path to high-charge, GeV-class electron bunches
• Gamma-Ray Flash Generation in Irradiating Thin Foil Target by Single Cycle Tightly Focused Extreme Power Laser Pulse
• Efficiently parallelized modeling of tightly focused, large bandwidth laser pulses