Plasma optics in the context of high intensity lasers

Abstract

The use of plasmas provides a way to overcome the low damage threshold of classical solid-state based optical materials, which is the main limitation encountered in producing and manipulating intense and energetic laser pulses. Plasmas can directly amplify or alter the characteristics of ultra-short laser pulses via the three-wave coupling equations for parametric processes. The strong-coupling regime of Brillouin scattering (sc-SBS) is of particular interest: recent progress in this domain is presented here. This includes the role of the global phase in the spatio-temporal evolution of the three-wave coupled equations for backscattering that allows a description of the coupling dynamics and the various stages of amplification from the initial growth to the so-called self-similar regime. The understanding of the phase evolution allows control of the directionality of the energy transfer via the phase relation between the pulses. A scheme that exploits this coupling in order to use the plasma as a wave plate is also suggested.