Picksley, A. and Alejo, A. and Shalloo, R. J. and Arran, C. and Von Boetticher, A. and Corner, L. and Holloway, J. A. and Jonnerby, J. and Jakobsson, O. and Thornton, C. and Walczak, R. and Hooker, S. M. (2020) Meter-scale conditioned hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized plasma channels. Physical Review E, 102 (5): 053201. ISSN 2470-0045
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We demonstrate through experiments and numerical simulations that low-density, low-loss, meter-scale plasma channels can be generated by employing a conditioning laser pulse to ionize the neutral gas collar surrounding a hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) plasma channel. We use particle-in-cell simulations to show that the leading edge of the conditioning pulse ionizes the neutral gas collar to generate a deep, low-loss plasma channel which guides the bulk of the conditioning pulse itself as well as any subsequently injected pulses. In proof-of-principle experiments, we generate conditioned HOFI (CHOFI) waveguides with axial electron densities of ne0≈1×1017cm-3 and a matched spot size of 26μm. The power attenuation length of these CHOFI channels was calculated to be Latt=(21±3)m, more than two orders of magnitude longer than achieved by HOFI channels. Hydrodynamic and particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate that meter-scale CHOFI waveguides with attenuation lengths exceeding 1 m could be generated with a total laser pulse energy of only 1.2 J per meter of channel. The properties of CHOFI channels are ideally suited to many applications in high-intensity light-matter interactions, including multi-GeV plasma accelerator stages operating at high pulse repetition rates.