Amplification and generation of ultra-intense twisted laser pulses via stimulated Raman scattering

• Autor(a) principal: Vieira, J.
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Trines, R. M. G., Alves, E. P., Fonseca, R. A., Mendonça, J. T., Bingham, R., Norreys, P., Silva, L. O.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/10917

Twisted Laguerre-Gaussian lasers, with orbital angular momentum and characterized by doughnut-shaped intensity profiles, provide a transformative set of tools and research directions in a growing range of fields and applications, from super-resolution microcopy and ultra-fast optical communications to quantum computing and astrophysics. The impact of twisted light is widening as recent numerical calculations provided solutions to long-standing challenges in plasma-based acceleration by allowing for high-gradient positron acceleration. The production of ultra-high-intensity twisted laser pulses could then also have a broad influence on relativistic laser-matter interactions. Here we show theoretically and with ab initio three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations that stimulated Raman backscattering can generate and amplify twisted lasers to petawatt intensities in plasmas. This work may open new research directions in nonlinear optics and high-energy-density science, compact plasma- based accelerators and light sources.