Beam Distortion Effects upon focusing an ultrashort Petawatt Laser Pulse to greater than 10${}^{22}$ W/cm${}^2$

Ganesh Tiwari, Erhard Gaul, Mikael Martinez +15

When an ultrashort laser pulse is tightly focused to a size approaching its central wavelength, the properties of the focused spot diverge from the diffraction limited case. Here w…