Plasma Photonics for Compression of High-power Laser Pulses

M.S. Hur

Ultraintense laser pulses are essential tools for experiments of predictions from modern theoretical physics. Whenzettawatt laser pulses become available, it is expected that the pair-production process, Hawking radiation, radiation reaction, and early universe states can be studied in laboratory scale settings. However, the conventional chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique is not suitable for accomplishing such a high power, mainly due to the damage-sensitivecompression gratings. Several ideas to replace the vulnerable gratings by a more damage-resistive plasma have been studied: Raman backward amplification, Brillouin amplification and plasma gratings. Recently we suggested a novel idea of pulse compression in a density-gradient plasma, where we obtained hundred times gain in intensity by compression of a pico-second laser pulse into a femto-second pulse. In this presentation, I address the state-of-arts in plasma-based pulse compression schemes and introduce our novel approach.