Suchergebnisse

We present the isolation of single attosecond pulses for multi-cycle and few-cycle laser pulses from high harmonic generation in overdense plasmas, calculated with particle-incell simulations. By the combination of two laser pulses of equal amplitude and a small frequency shift between them, we demonstrate that it is possible to shorten the region in which the laser pulse is most intense, therefore restricting the generation of high harmonic orders in the form of attosecond pulses to a narrower time window. The creation of this window is achieved due to the combination of the laser pulse envelope and the slow oscillating wave obtained from the coherent sum of the two pulses. A parametric scan, performed with particle-in-cell simulations, reveals how the pulse isolation behaves for different input laser pulse lengths and which are the optimal frequency shifts between the two laser pulses in each case, giving the conditions for having a good isolation of an attosecond pulse when working with laser-plasma interaction in overdense targets. ; European Union and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (MINECO) (MAT2015-71119-R AEI/FEDER); Xunta de Galicia/FEDER (Agrup2015/11 (PC034)); Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (MECD) (FPU14/00289) ; SI

The interaction of ultrashort, high intensity laser pulses with thin foil targets leads to ion acceleration on the target rear surface. To make this ion source useful for applications, it is important to optimize the transfer of energy from the laser into the accelerated ions. One of the most promising ways to achieve this consists in engineering the target front by introducing periodic nanostructures. In this paper, the effect of these structures on ion acceleration is studied analytically and with multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations.Weassessed the role of the structure shape, size, and the angle of laser incidence for obtaining the efficient energy transfer. Local control of electron trajectories is exploited to maximize the energy delivered into the target. Based on our numerical simulations, we propose a precise range of parameters for fabrication of nanostructured targets, which can increase the energy of the accelerated ions without requiring a higher laser intensity. ; This work has been partially supported by the Xunta de Galicia/FEDER under contract Agrup2015/11 (PC034) and by MINECO under contracts MAT2015-71119-R and FIS2015-71933-REDT. The authors would like to acknowledge the OSIRIS Consortium, consisting of UCLA and IST (Lisbon, Portugal) for the use of OSIRIS, for providing access to the OSIRIS framework. M Blanco also thanks the Ministry of Education of the Spanish government for the FPU fellowship. Camilo Ruiz also thanks MINECO project FIS2016-75652-P M Vranic acknowledges the support of ERC-2010-AdG Grant 267841 and LASERLAB-EUROPE IV—GA No. 654148. Simulations were performed at the Accelerates cluster (Lisbon, Portugal) ; SI