Session CO2 - Laser Accelerators; Ultraintense Laser Applications.
ORAL session, Monday afternoon, November 15
Room 203, SCC
The injection of laser pulses into hydrodynamically preformed plasma channels is hindered by the neutral gas and down tapered channel wall at the entrance of the channel. To improve the coupling efficiency, we consider grafting a plasma funnel onto the channel using an auxiliary formation pulse. This eliminates the neutral gas near the channel entrance and provides a focusing element to funnel the high intensity laser into the channel. We generate channel and funnel profiles using our 1D hydrocode. These are then imported to the laser propagation code WAKE. Simulation results show that the averaged on-axis peak intensity inside the channel can reach 10^18 W/cm^2 for the optimal gas jet target assuming the channel is fully ionized. The pulse energy leaks when the channel is partially ionized.