Weakly relativistic and ponderomotive effects on self-focusing and self-compression of laser pulses in near critical plasmas

作者：Bokaei B^*; Niknam A R

来源：Physics of Plasmas, 2014, 21(10): 103107.

DOI：10.1063/1.4898057

The spatiotemporal dynamics of high power laser pulses in near critical plasmas are studied taking in to account the effects of relativistic and ponderomotive nonlinearities. First, within one-dimensional analysis, the effects of initial parameters such as laser intensity, plasma density, and plasma electron temperature on the self-compression mechanism are discussed. The results illustrate that the ponderomotive nonlinearity obstructs the relativistic self-compression above a certain intensity value. Moreover, the results indicate the existence of the turning point temperature in which the compression process has its strongest strength. Next, the three-dimensional analysis of laser pulse propagation is investigated by coupling the self-focusing equation with the self-compression one. It is shown that in contrast to the case in which the only relativistic nonlinearity is considered, in the presence of ponderomotive nonlinearity, the self-compression mechanism obstructs the self-focusing and leads to an increase of the laser spot size.

• 出版日期2014-10