Distortion-free guiding of 0.2/spl times/10/sup 18/ W/cm/sup 2/ pulses through a fully-ionized 1.5 cm He plasma channel

摘要

Plasma waveguides capable of guiding relativistically intense is laser pulses without optical distortion are essential to developing GeV-scale laser wakefield accelerators and coherent short-wavelength sources. We report the highest intensity-length product to date for distortion-free guiding. We generated our channels in a backfill of He gas. This intensity readily field-ionizes high-Z gases thus initiating the channel-forming process, but forms an incompletely-ionized channel, in which relativistically intense pulses suffer ionization-induced phase distortion during guiding and ionization-induced defocusing when entering the channel.