S. R. Yoffe

An ultra-high gain and efficient amplifier based on Raman amplification in plasma

Raman amplification arising from the excitation of a density echelon in plasma could lead to amplifiers that significantly exceed current power limits of conventional laser media. Here we show that 1–100 J pump pulses can amplify picojoule seed pulses to nearly joule level. The extremely high gain also leads to significant amplification of backscattered radiation from “noise”, arising from stochastic plasma fluctuations that competes with externally injected seed pulses, which are amplified to similar levels at the highest pump energies. The pump energy is scattered into the seed at an oblique angle with 14 J sr−1, and net gains of more than eight orders of magnitude. The maximum gain coefficient, of 180 cm−1, exceeds high-power solid-state amplifying media by orders of magnitude. The observation of a minimum of 640 J sr−1 directly backscattered from noise, corresponding to ≈10% of the pump energy in the observation solid angle, implies potential overall efficiencies greater than 10%.

Longitudinal and transverse cooling of relativistic electron beams in intense laser pulses

With the emergence in the next few years of a new breed of high power laser facilities, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how interacting with intense laser pulses affects the bulk properties of a relativistic electron beam. A detailed analysis of the radiative cooling of electrons indicates that, classically, equal contributions to the phase space contraction occur in the transverse and longitudinal directions. In the weakly quantum regime, in addition to an overall reduction in beam cooling, this symmetry is broken, leading to significantly less cooling in the longitudinal than the transverse directions. By introducing an efficient new technique for studying the evolution of a particle distribution, we demonstrate the quantum reduction in beam cooling, and find that it depends on the distribution of energy in the laser pulse, rather than just the total energy as in the classical case.

Taylor's (1935) dissipation surrogate reinterpreted

New results from direct numerical simulation of decaying isotropic turbulence show that Taylor’s expression for the viscous dissipation rate e=CeU3/L is more appropriately interpreted as a surrogate for the inertial energy flux. As a consequence, the well known dependence of the Taylor prefactor Ce on Reynolds number Ce(RL)→Ce,∞ can be understood as corresponding to the onset of an inertial range.

Energy transfer and dissipation in forced isotropic turbulence

A model for the Reynolds-number dependence of the dimensionless dissipation rate C(ɛ) was derived from the dimensionless Kármán-Howarth equation, resulting in C(ɛ)=C(ɛ,∞)+C/R(L)+O(1/R(L)(2)), where R(L) is the integral scale Reynolds number. The coefficients C and C(ɛ,∞) arise from asymptotic expansions of the dimensionless second- and third-order structure functions. This theoretical work was supplemented by direct numerical simulations (DNSs) of forced isotropic turbulence for integral scale Reynolds numbers up to R(L)=5875 (R(λ)=435), which were used to establish that the decay of dimensionless dissipation with increasing Reynolds number took the form of a power law R(L)(n) with exponent value n=-1.000±0.009 and that this decay of C(ɛ) was actually due to the increase in the Taylor surrogate U(3)/L. The model equation was fitted to data from the DNS, which resulted in the value C=18.9±1.3 and in an asymptotic value for C(ɛ) in the infinite Reynolds-number limit of C(ɛ,∞)=0.468±0.006.

Chirped pulse Raman amplification in warm plasma: towards controlling saturation

Stimulated Raman backscattering in plasma is potentially an efficient method of amplifying laser pulses to reach exawatt powers because plasma is fully broken down and withstands extremely high electric fields. Plasma also has unique nonlinear optical properties that allow simultaneous compression of optical pulses to ultra-short durations. However, current measured efficiencies are limited to several percent. Here we investigate Raman amplification of short duration seed pulses with different chirp rates using a chirped pump pulse in a preformed plasma waveguide. We identify electron trapping and wavebreaking as the main saturation mechanisms, which lead to spectral broadening and gain saturation when the seed reaches several millijoules for durations of 10’s – 100’s fs for 250 ps, 800 nm chirped pump pulses. We show that this prevents access to the nonlinear regime and limits the efficiency, and interpret the experimental results using slowly-varying-amplitude, current-averaged particle-in-cell simulations. We also propose methods for achieving higher efficiencies.

Towards attosecond high-energy electron bunches: controlling self-injection in laser wakefield accelerators through plasma density modulation

Self-injection in a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator is usually achieved by increasing the laser intensity until the threshold for injection is exceeded. Alternatively, the velocity of the bubble accelerating structure can be controlled using plasma density ramps, reducing the electron velocity required for injection. We present a model describing self-injection in the short-bunch regime for arbitrary changes in the plasma density. We derive the threshold condition for injection due to a plasma density gradient, which is confirmed using particle-in-cell simulations that demonstrate injection of subfemtosecond bunches. It is shown that the bunch charge, bunch length, and separation of bunches in a bunch train can be controlled by tailoring the plasma density profile.

Self-organization and transition to turbulence in isotropic fluid motion driven by negative damping at low wavenumbers

We observe a symmetry-breaking transition from a turbulent to a self-organized state in direct numerical simulation of the Navier–Stokes equation at very low Reynolds number. In this self-organized state the kinetic energy is contained only in modes at the lowest resolved wavenumber, the skewness vanishes, and visualization of the flows shows a lack of small-scale structure, with the vorticity and velocity vectors becoming aligned (a Beltrami flow). S Online supplementary data available from stacks.iop.org/jpa/48/25FT01/ mmedia

Spectral analysis of structure functions and their scaling exponents in forced isotropic turbulence

The pseudospectral method, in conjunction with a technique for obtaining scaling exponents ζ_{n} from the structure functions S_{n}(r), is presented as an alternative to the extended self-similarity (ESS) method and the use of generalized structure functions. We propose plotting the ratio |S_{n}(r)/S_{3}(r)| against the separation r in accordance with a standard technique for analyzing experimental data. This method differs from the ESS technique, which plots S_{n}(r) against S_{3}(r), with the assumption S_{3}(r)∼r. Using our method for the particular case of S_{2}(r) we obtain the result that the exponent ζ_{2} decreases as the Taylor-Reynolds number increases, with ζ_{2}→0.679±0.013 as R_{λ}→∞. This supports the idea of finite-viscosity corrections to the K41 prediction for S_{2}, and is the opposite of the result obtained by ESS. The pseudospectral method also permits the forcing to be taken into account exactly through the calculation of the energy input in real space from the work spectrum of the stirring forces.

Cooling of relativistic electron beams in chirped laser pulses

The next few years will see next-generation high-power laser facilities (such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure) become operational, for which it is important to understand how interaction with intense laser pulses affects the bulk properties of a relativistic electron beam. At such high field intensities, we expect both radiation reaction and quantum effects to play a significant role in the beam dynamics. The resulting reduction in relative energy spread (beam cooling) at the expense of mean beam energy predicted by classical theories of radiation reaction depends only on the energy of the laser pulse. Quantum effects suppress this cooling, with the dynamics additionally sensitive to the distribution of energy within the pulse. Since chirps occur in both the production of high-intensity pulses (CPA) and the propagation of pulses in media, the effect of using chirps to modify the pulse shape has been investigated using a semi-classical extension to the Landau-Lifshitz theory. Results indicate that even large chirps introduce a significantly smaller change to final state predictions than going from a classical to quantum model for radiation reaction, the nature of which can be intuitively understood.

Observations on the ponderomotive force

The ponderomotive force is an important concept in plasma physics and, in particular, plays an important role in many aspects of the theory of laser plasma interactions including current concerns like wakefield acceleration and Raman amplification. The most familiar form of this gives a force on a charged particle that is proportional to the slowly varying gradient of the intensity of a high frequency electromagnetic field and directed down the intensity gradiant. For a field amplitude simply oscillating in time there is a simple derivation of this formula, but in the more general case of a travelling wave the problem is more difficult. Over the years there has been much work on this using Hamiltonian or Lagrangian averaging techniques, but little or no investigation of how well these theories work. Here we look at the very basic problem of a particle entering a region with a monotonically increasing electrostatic field amplitude and being reflected. We show that the equation of motion derived from a widely quoted ponderomotive potential only agrees with the numerically computed orbit within a restricted parameter range and that outside this range it shows features which are inconsistent with any ponderomotive potential quadratic in the field amplitude. Since the ponderomotive force plays a fundamental role in a variety of problems in plasma physics we think that it is important to point out that even in the simplest of configurations standard theories may not be accurate.