Influence of the Experimental Setup on Electromagnetic Pulses in the VHF Band at Relativistic High-Power Laser Facilities

Abstract

We present experimental results for the controlled mitigation of the electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) produced in the interactions of a 1 PW high-power 30 fs Ti:Sa laser VEGA-3 with solid-density targets transparent to laser-forward-accelerated relativistic electrons. This study aims at the band of very high frequencies (VHFs), i.e., those in the hundreds of MHz, which comprise the fundamental cavity modes of the rectangular VEGA-3 vacuum chamber. We demonstrate mode suppression by a tailoring of the laser-produced space charge distribution.

Keywords

• laser-generated EMPs
• EMP mitigation
• high-power laser
• relativistic laser–plasma