Sharif Digital Repository

Gupta et al. [J. Opt. Soc. Am. B. 24, No. 5 (2007)] have introduced a localized upward plasma density ramp to overcome the defocusing of a laser beam. We report that there are fundamental mistakes in their work. First, the density profile formula that they have introduced is dimensionally incorrect. Second, the calculated dielectric constant is wrong as well, which renders their main spot size equation and the quantitative results unacceptable, and it seriously falters the results of the self-focusing. We correctly derived a new equation of the spot size, and the computational curves are also presented  

This work is devoted to improving relativistic self-focusing of intense laser beam in underdense unmagnetized plasma. New density profiles are introduced to achieve beam width parameter up to the wavelength of the propagating laser. By investigating variations of the beam width parameter in presence of different density profiles it is found that the beam width parameter is considerably decreased for the introduced density ramp comparing with uniform density and earlier introduced density ramp profiles. By using this new density profile high intensity laser pulses are guided over several Rayleigh lengths with extremely small beam width parameter  

The propagation of a Gaussian beam in underdense plasma with upward increasing density ramp is analyzed. In this work are shown that the spot size oscillations of laser beam increases and its amplitude shrinks with proper plasma density ramp. This causes the laser beam to become more focused and penetrations deep into the plasma by reduction of diffraction effect. The related focusing parameters are optimized to get the best possible focusing at the relativistic threshold intensity of Nd-glass laser and the effect of the laser intensity in the self-focusing parameters is also investigated. The analytical calculations are presented and showed more reliable results in comparison to the... 

In this paper, the effect of basic parameters of laser and plasma on controlling self-focusing is investigated, and based on the introduced effective parameter for self-focusing (EPSF), the effects of laser wavelength, the initial spot size of laser beam, the initial intensity of laser, and the plasma electron density on self-focusing are discussed. It is found that the relativistic self-focusing strongly depend on the laser wavelength and the beam intensity. The nonlinear effect of beam intensity on the introduced parameter EPSF indicates that after an increasing region for focusing, the self-focusing effect decreases at ultrarelativistic intensities. The effect of the initial beam spot... 

Measurement of extremely new phenomena during the interaction of laser pulses with terawatt and higher power and picoseconds with plasmas arrived at drastically different anomalies in contrast to the usual observations if the laser pulses were very clean with a contrast ratio higher than 108. This was guaranteed by the suppression of prepulses during less than dozens of ps before the arrival of the main pulse resulting in the suppression of relativistic self-focusing. This anomaly was confirmed in many experimental details, and explained and numerically reproduced as a nonlinear force acceleration of skin layers generating quasi-neutral plasma blocks with ion current densities above 1011...