activity
20242026
collaborators

9 papers

physics.optics2026

Gas Beam Dump and Power Meter for High Energy Lasers

Harsha Rajesh, Sida Cao, Ke Ou +3

Gaseous optics exhibit substantially higher laser-induced-damage thresholds than solid materials, enabling high-intensity operation without permanent degradation. In this Letter, w…

physics.plasm-ph2026

Electron penetration heating in turbulent magnetic loops driven by nonrelativistic laser-plasma interaction

Zheng Gong, Sida Cao, Caleb Redshaw +1

Using particle-in-cell simulations to study nonrelativistic laser pulse propagation in a under-critical plasma, we identify a novel mechanism that occurs during the growth of turbu…

physics.optics2026

Flying focus with arbitrary directionality for spatiotemporal control of laser pulses

Sida Cao, Devdigvijay Singh, Lavonne S. Mack +2

Flying focus techniques produce laser pulses whose focal points travel at arbitrary, controllable velocities. While this flexibility can enhance a broad range of laser-based applic…

physics.plasm-ph2026

Dispersive Properties of Plasma Diffraction Gratings: Towards Plasma-Based Laser Pulse Compression

Victor M. Perez-Ramirez, Michelle M. Wang, Ke Ou +10

The standard architecture for a high-peak-power femtosecond laser is chirped pulse amplification using diffraction gratings for compression; the damage threshold of the compression…

physics.plasm-ph2026

Intense tunable terahertz radiation from phase-matched difference frequency generation in strongly magnetized plasmas

Sida Cao, Matthew R. Edwards

High-energy terahertz pulses are challenging to produce due to the low conversion efficiency and limited optical damage threshold of nonlinear crystals. Here, we describe the high-…

physics.optics2026

Near-Unity-Efficiency Gas Gratings for Ultraviolet, Visible, and Infrared High-Power Lasers

Ke Ou, Harsha Rajesh, Sida Cao +13

Interfering deep ultraviolet (DUV) lasers can induce substantial density modulations in an ozone-doped gas flow via photochemical reactions, creating volume diffraction gratings. T…