Compression of high power lasers in plasma

Abstract

While achievable laser intensities have grown remarkably during recent years, mainly due to the method of chirped pulse amplification, to attain very much higher powers would demand suitable material gratings for handling very high power and very high total energy. However, plasma is an ideal medium for processing very high power and very high total energy, making feasible, in principle, much higher laser intensities than might otherwise be contemplated. The idea in plasma is to store energy in a long pump pulse which is quickly depleted by a short counter-propagating pulse. This counter-propagating wave effect has already been employed in Raman amplifiers using gases or plasmas. At very high power, there are nonlinear effects in plasma that enter which make such methods particularly suitable for high power pulse compression.