Excitation of Accelerating Plasma Waves by Counter-propagating Laser Beams
Authors: Gennady Shvets, Nathaniel J. Fisch, and Alexander Pukhov
Date of PPPL Report: April 2002
Published in: Physics of Plasmas 9 (May 2002) 2383-2392
The conventional approach to exciting high phase velocity waves in plasmas is to employ a laser pulse moving in the direction of the desired particle acceleration. Photon downshifting then causes momentum transfer to the plasma and wave excitation. Novel approaches to plasma wake excitation, colliding-beam accelerator (CBA), which involve photon exchange between the long and short counter-propagating laser beams, are described. Depending on the frequency detuning Dw between beams and duration tL of the short pulse, there are two approaches to CBA. The first approach assumes (tLapproximately equal to 2/wp). Photons exchanged between the beams deposit their recoil momentum in the plasma driving the plasma wake. Frequency detuning between the beams determines the direction of the photon exchange, thereby controlling the phase of the plasma wake. This phase control can be used for reversing the slippage of the accelerated particles with respect to the wake. A variation on the same theme, super-beatwave accelerator, is also described. In the second approach, a short pulse with tL >> wp-1 detuned by Dw ~ 2wp from the counter-propagating beam is employed. While parametric excitation of plasma waves by the electromagnetic beatwave at 2wp of two co-propagating lasers was first predicted by Rosenbluth and Liu [M.N. Rosenbluth, C.S. Liu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 29 701 (1972)], it is demonstrated that the two excitation beams can be counter-propagating. The advantages of using this geometry (higher instability growth rate, insensitivity to plasma inhomogeneity) are explained, and supporting numerical simulations presented.