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REVIEW ARTICLE
Abstract. Recent theoretical and experimental research with short-pulse, high-intensity lasers
is surveyed with particular emphasis on new physical processes that occur in interactions
with low- and high-density plasmas. Basic models of femtosecond laser–solid interaction are
described including collisional absorption, transport, hydrodynamics, fast electron and hard x-ray
generation, together with recently predicted phenomena at extreme intensities, such as gigagauss
magnetic fields and induced transparency. New developments in the complementary field of
nonlinear propagation in ionized gases are reviewed, including field ionization, relativistic self-
focusing, wakefield generation and scattering instabilities. Applications in the areas of x-ray
generation for medical and biological imaging, new coherent light sources, nonlinear wave
guiding and particle acceleration are also examined.
1. Introduction
There are few technological advances which can lay claim to the number and variety of
new research fields as the arrival of the femtosecond laser. In less than a decade, ‘short-
pulse’ lasers have found applications in the physical sciences, medicine and engineering,
and dozens of new research groups have been created under the rubric of ultrafast science.
So what is so special about short-pulse lasers? First, their duration, reduced from a few
tens of picoseconds in the mid-1980s to a state-of-the-art 10 fs, allows phenomena to be
investigated which were simply too ‘fast’ for the old generation of lasers. Second, the ability
to generate coherent light pulses 1000 times shorter means that for the same energy and cost,
a laser beam can be focused to 1000 times greater intensity than was previously possible.
Thus, whereas one used to speak of ‘high intensities’ of 1014 –1015 W cm−2 , nowadays
fluxes of 1018 W cm−2 are routinely achieved with benchtop lasers, and systems capable of
reaching a dizzy 1021 W cm−2 are already under construction in several laboratories around
the world.
The electric field strengths of such lasers are orders of magnitude higher than those
binding electrons to atoms, which means that a gaseous or solid target placed at the laser
focus will undergo rapid ionization. The plasma formed in this manner will comprise
the usual fluid-like mixture of electrons and ions, but many of its basic properties will
be essentially controlled by the laser field, rather than by its own density and temperature.
Under these conditions, many of the old rules of laser–plasma interaction must be rewritten; a
fact which has prompted a number of popular articles heralding new physics and applications
(Burgess and Hutchinson 1993, Perry and Mourou 1994, Joshi and Corkum 1995). Of
course, it is not essential to focus to these extremes to do science with such lasers: there are
plenty of applications, such as high-harmonic generation in gases (L’Huillier and Balcou
0741-3335/96/060769+25$19.50
c 1996 IOP Publishing Ltd 769
770 P Gibbon and E Förster
1993), which need a large number of pump photons delivered in a short time, but not
necessarily squeezed into a small focal spot. A high-power laser system therefore has the
versatility to access completely different physics depending upon the optical arrangement
and the nature of the target. Consider, for example, the standard T3 (‘Table-Top-Terawatt’)
system now becoming standard equipment in laser and physics laboratories alike. With
a few changes to the focusing optics and target area, such a system can be used for
harmonic generation at 1015 W cm−2 , while at the same time providing a source for studying
instabilities (Darrow et al 1992) and relativistic propagation (Borisov et al l992, Monot et
al l995b) of intense beams in tenuous (underdense) plasmas at 1018 W cm−2 , and for
generating hard x-rays from solid targets (Murnane et al 1991).
This new regime of laser–matter interaction has been made possible thanks to a technique
known as chirped-pulse-amplification (CPA) (Strickland and Mourou 1985, Maine et al
1988). In CPA, a short pulse is first stretched to a nanosecond duration, amplified by a
factor > 108 , and then recompressed to its original duration. While it is not our intention
to provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art technology here, we list some of the
larger multi-terawatt systems in table 1.
the basic physics of laser–plasma interaction and the end-user who is mainly interested in
the characteristics of the photons or particles emitted and, in particular, in whether the
femtosecond laser–plasma source has advantages over conventional sources.
Whether the target medium placed at the focus is gaseous or solid, short-pulse, high-intensity
interactions with matter generally involve a number of physical processes: ionization,
propagation and refraction, generation of plasma waves, and the subsequent thermal and
hydrodynamic evolution of the target material. The importance of any one of these
processes depends heavily upon the laser parameters, and we shall shortly see how the
evolution in laser technology towards shorter pulses and higher intensities has shifted the
research emphasis from atomic physics and linear laser–plasma wave coupling, to extremely
nonlinear collective phenomena. Likewise, on the application side, we have seen a shift
towards harder, brighter x-ray sources and production of more energetic particles. This has
presented a challenge both to theorists, who have to solve more complex equations to model
the physics, and to experimentalists, who have to devise more sophisticated diagnostics in
order to isolate or exploit these effects.
Figure 1. Physics of fs laser interaction with (a) solids and (b) gases.
772 P Gibbon and E Förster
We have attempted to summarize the main interaction physics in figure 1, which indicates
the intensity range in which various phenomena predominantly occur. Above intensities of,
say, 1016 W cm−2 , many of the effects actually depend upon the laser irradiance I λ2 , which
means that the ‘threshold’ intensity for a given phenomenon can vary depending upon the
laser wavelength. This applies, for example, to any effect which involves the quiver velocity
of an electron in the electric field of the laser,
1/2
vos I λ2
= 0.84 .
c 1018 W cm−2 µm2
Thus, to give an electron an oscillation energy Uos = 1/2me vos
2
of 1 keV, we need a 1 µm
laser with I = 10 W cm , or a 0.248 µm KrF laser with I = 1.6 × 1017 W cm−2 .
16 −2
In this picture, the plasma is assumed to be ionized to some degree and can be treated
as a conductor with a permittivity:
ωp2
ε =1− (1)
ω0 (ω0 + iνei )
where νei is the electron–ion collision frequency, given by:
νei ' 3 × 10−6 ZNe Te−3/2 log 3s −1
where Z is the number of free electrons, Ne is the electron density in cm−3 , Te is the
temperature in eV and log 3 is the Coulomb logarithm. By matching the electric and
magnetic fields at the vacuum–plasma boundary, one can obtain the absorption coefficient
for highly overdense plasmas (ωp /ω0 1) in two limits (More et al 1988a, Gamaliy 1994):
2ν
ei
νei ω0
ω
p
A= (2)
2ω
0 (νei /ωp )1/2 νei > ω0 .
ωp
This result can be generalized to arbitrary angles of incidence and polarization (s or p)
using the Fresnel equations (Born and Wolf 1980). The absorbed energy is then used to
determine the temperature from the equation of state for the plasma. This can be calculated
using the ideal gas law at low densities, or the Thomas–Fermi statistical model at high
densities (Pfalzner 1991). Further refinements can be made by including non-equilibrium
and low-temperature effects (More et al 1988b). The Thomas–Fermi model is also often
used to determine the number of free electrons, or ionization degree, but for very short
pulses it is more appropriate to solve the atomic populations explicitly (Edwards and Rose
1993). Although one can include most collisional and radiative effects this way, a fully self-
consistent ionization model, including field-ionization (Pfalzner 1992) and non-Maxwellian
effects still remains a challenge.
Given the temperature and ionization state, the next step is to determine how the energy
is transported into the target. More et al (1988a) did this by solving the diffusion equation
with conductivities based on the usual Spitzer–Härm heat flow (Zel’dovich and Raizer 1966)
but modified for high densities (Lee and More 1984). This can be made more sophisticated
by using a Fokker–Planck treatment of collisions which explicitly takes into account non-
local transport (Rozmus and Tikhonchuk 1990). With either approach, a self-similar solution
can be found which describes the heat-front penetration into the target and sets an upper
limit on the pulse duration above which hydrodynamics becomes significant.
774 P Gibbon and E Förster
comparison with the classical Spitzer–Härm theory of thermal transport. These workhorse
models are depicted schematically in figure 3.
In other words, collisional absorption starts to turn off for irradiances I λ2 >
1015 W cm−2 µm2 , and therefore could not account for the high absorption observed,
for example, by Chaker et al (1991) and Meyerhofer et al (1993).
Given this discrepancy, alternative absorption mechanisms were sought which did not
rely on collisions between electrons and ions. In fact, there are a number of collisionless
processes which can couple laser energy to the plasma. The best known and most studied
of these is resonance absorption, although it is not immediately clear how effective this is in
steep density gradients. In the standard picture (Ginzburg 1964), a p-polarized light wave
tunnels through to the critical surface (Ne = Nc ), where it excites a plasma wave. This
wave grows over a number of laser periods and is eventually damped either by collisions at
low intensities or by particle trapping and wave breaking at high intensities (Kruer 1988).
For long density scale lengths, defined by k0 L 1, where k0 = 2π/λ is the laser wave
vector and L−1 ≡ |d(log Ne )/dx|x=xc , the absorption rate has a self-similar dependence upon
the parameter (k0 L)2/3 sin2 θ (Ginzburg 1964). This behaviour is more-or-less independent
of the damping mechanism provided the pump amplitude is small, a condition which we
shall quantify shortly. ‘Collisionless’ resonance absorption can therefore be modelled in a
776 P Gibbon and E Förster
hydro-code even if the collision rate is too small to give significant inverse-bremsstrahlung
(Rae and Burnett 1991). This is usually done by introducing a phenomenological collision
frequency in the vicinity of the critical surface (Forslund et al 1975a) such that one recovers
the ∼ 50% optimum absorption rate in the long scale-length limit.
Although the overall energy balance will be taken care of in this manner, the way in
which it is divided into thermal and suprathermal electron heating can only be determined
self-consistently using a kinetic approach such as particle-in-cell (PIC) (Birdsall and
Langdon 1985) or Vlasov simulation.
Resonance absorption was studied extensively in the 1970s and 1980s with two-
dimensional PIC codes in order to understand the origin of fast electrons generated in
nanosecond laser–plasma interactions (Estabrook et al 1975, Forslund et al 1977, Estabrook
and Kruer 1978, Adam and Héron 1988, Kruer 1988). Ironically, fast electron generation
is highly undesirable in the ICF context because it leads to preheating of the fuel, thus
preventing targets from being compressed to the necessary densities for high thermonuclear
gain. With the advent of short pulses, however, fast electrons are very much back in fashion
because they generate hard x-rays as they travel through the cold part of the target behind
the hot plasma where they are generated.
As hinted at earlier, resonance absorption ceases to work in its usual form in very
steep density gradients. To see this, consider a resonantly driven plasma wave at the critical
density with a field amplitude Ep . In a sharp-edged profile, there will be little field swelling,
and Ep will be roughly the same as the incident laser field E0 . Electrons will therefore
undergo oscillations along the density gradient with an amplitude
Xp ' eE0 /me ω02 = vos /ω0 .
The resonance breaks down if this amplitude exceeds the density scale length L, i.e. if
vos /ω0 L > 1.
Under these conditions, it is no longer useful to speak of electrons being heated by
a plasma wave, since this wave is destroyed and rebuilt afresh each cycle. This simple
fact was pointed out by Brunel (1987), who proposed an alternative mechanism in which
electrons are directly heated by the p-polarized component of the laser field. According
to Brunel’s model, electrons are dragged away from the target surface, turned around and
accelerated back into the solid all within half a laser cycle. These electrons are simply
absorbed because the field only penetrates to a skin depth or so. Assuming electrons gain a
velocity vos during their vacuum orbit, the absorption fraction can be estimated as (Bonnaud
et al 1991)
vos
3f (θ) A1
c
A= (4)
3 f (θ) vos A∼1
8 c
where f (θ ) = sin3 θ/ cos θ.
The hot electron temperature inferred from this model and from electrostatic PIC
simulations is just
Thot ∝ vos
2
' 3.6I16 λ2µ (5)
where I16 is the intensity in 1016 W cm−2 and λµ the wavelength in microns.
While this capacitor model predicts both high absorption and a strong hot temperature
scaling, subsequent studies with electromagnetic codes showed that the mechanism saturates
at high intensity due to deflection of the electron orbits by the v ∧ B force (Estabrook and
Short-pulse laser–plasma interactions 777
Kruer 1986, Brunel 1988). On the other hand, the saturation effect can be partially overcome
by using two incident beams at ±45◦ .
Just as for collisional absorption, the situation becomes more complicated for realistic
profiles with finite density gradients. This case was considered by Gibbon and Bell
(1992), who found a highly complex transition between resonance absorption and vacuum
heating depending upon the irradiance and scale length. For high irradiances and short
scale lengths, the absorption saturates at around 10–15%, but for intermediate values (e.g.
I λ2 = 1016 W cm−2 µm2 , L/λ ∼ 0.1), the absorption can be as high as 70%. These
results are in good agreement with a more recent analytical study of absorption in short
scale-length profiles (Andreev et al 1994). The hot electron temperature scales according
to
1/3
Thot ' 8 I16 λ2N keV (6)
which is somewhat lower than the scaling from simulations of resonance absorption in
steepened density profiles (Forslund et al 1977, Estabrook and Kruer 1978, Kruer 1988).
In simulations with mobile ions, however, a rather different picture emerges. The strong
space charge created by electrons circulating outside the surface pulls out an underdense
ion shelf which can drastically√alter the absorption (Brunel 1988, Gibbon 1994). After
a characteristic time ts ' 100 A/Zλµ fs, the absorption and hot electron distribution
resemble those seen in early simulations; the main difference being that the pressure
balance assumed and imposed in long-pulse (ns) interactions (Forslund et al 1977) is
unlikely to be achieved for femtosecond pulses. This lack of hydrodynamic equilibrium can
strongly influence the hot electron fraction and temperature scaling. For extreme intensities
(I > 1020 W cm−2 µm2 ) at normal incidence, energy is transferred directly to the ions
through the formation of a collisionless shock (Denavit 1992).
A third collisionless mechanism which is closely related to vacuum heating is the
anomalous skin effect. This is actually a well known effect in solid-state physics (Ziman
1969), and was originally studied for step-like vacuum–plasma interfaces by Weibel (1967).
Its potential significance for short-pulse interaction was therefore recognized quite early
by a number of workers (Gamaliy and Tikhonchuk 1988, Mulser et al 1989, Rozmus and
Tikhonchuk 1990, Andreev et al 1992).
Physically, the anomalous skin effect is not as mysterious as it sounds. Consider first
the situation for the normal skin effect. Electrons within the skin layer δ = c/ωp oscillate
in the laser field and dissipate energy through collisions with ions. The oscillation energy
is thus locally thermalized provided that the electron mean-free path la = vte /νei is smaller
than the skin depth. Now imagine that the temperature is increased so that la > δ, and that
the mean thermal excursion length vte /ω0 > δ. Under these conditions, the laser field is
carried further into the plasma and the effective collision frequency is given by the excursion
time in the anomalous skin layer δa , i.e. νeff = vte /δa , where δa = (c2 vte /ω0 ωp2 )1/3 (Weibel
1967). For normal incidence in the overdense limit, one finds (Rozmus and Tikhonchuk
1990, Andreev et al 1992):
1/3 1/6 1/3
ω0 vte ω02 Te Nc
A' δa = ' . (7)
c cωp2 511 keV Ne
Self-consistent theories of the anomalous skin effect solve the full Vlasov equation in
order to correctly describe the non-local relationship between the current and the electric
field (Weibel 1967, Mulser et al 1989, Gamaliy 1994, Matte and Aguenaou 1992, Andreev
et al 1992). None the less, just as with resonance absorption, the effect can also be included
in a hydrodynamic model by replacing νei with an effective collision frequency.
778 P Gibbon and E Förster
The Fresnel equations can again be used to obtain the angular absorption dependence in
the step-profile limit (Andreev et al 1992). The maximum absorption for p-polarized light
is nominally A ∼ 2/3 at grazing incidence angles, independent of density and temperature,
but can be enhanced if the distribution function is anisotropic. A more complete study of
anomalous skin absorption including relativistic effects has been made by Ruhl and Mulser
(1995).
As we saw earlier, ion motion can alter the electron dynamics by changing the density
profile near the critical surface. As long as this motion remains normal to the gradient, the
absorption and hydrodynamics can still be modelled in one dimension, even for obliquely
incident light. This picture becomes inadequate if a hole is formed, or if the surface develops
ripples. Both of these situations can occur for finite focal spot sizes (which are typically
diffraction-limited to 2–10 µm) and at extreme irradiances (I λ2 > 1018 W cm−2 µm2 ).
This regime was studied by Wilks et al (l992) using two-dimensional PIC simulation. They
found that tightly focused, normally incident light can bore a hole several wavelengths deep
through moderately overdense plasma on the sub-picosecond timescale.
‘Hole boring’ results from a combination of three effects. First, the light pressure, PL =
2I /c ' 600I18 Mbar, vastly exceeds the thermal plasma pressure, Pe = 160N23 Te Mbar
(where N23 is the density in 1023 cm−3 and I18 is the intensity in 1018 W cm−2 ). This will
cause the plasma to be pushed inwards preferentially at the centre of the focal spot. Second,
a radial ponderomotive force due to the transverse intensity gradient ∇r I pushes electrons
away from the centre of the beam, creating a charge separation which pulls the ions out.
Third, the skin depth is enhanced where the laser intensity is greatest due to relativistic
decrease in the effective plasma frequency: ωp0 = ωp /γ , where γ = (1 + vos 2
/2c2 )1/2 .
At sufficiently extreme intensities this could lead to ‘induced transparency’, where the
laser beam is transmitted through a nominally overdense plasma instead of being reflected
(Lefebvre and Bonnaud 1995). As a hole is formed, the absorption and hot electron
temperature both increase because density gradients are formed parallel to the laser electric
field (Wilks 1993).
Another two-dimensional effect is magnetic field generation, which has long been a
subject of fascination in the field of laser–plasma interactions. Of particular interest are the
large DC fields which can arise from electron transport around the focal spot. In short-pulse
interactions, there are at least three mechanisms which can generate B-fields:
(i) radial transport where the electron temperature and density gradients are not parallel
(Stamper et al 1971), giving a source term ∂B/∂t ∝ ∇Ne ∧ ∇Te ;
(ii) DC currents in steep density gradients driven by temporal variations in the
ponderomotive force (Sudan 1993, Wilks et al 1992);
(iii) hot electron surface currents (Brunel 1988, Gibbon 1994, Ruhl and Mulser 1995).
The first of these mechanisms, which occurs on the hydrodynamic timescale, persists long
after the laser pulse and can cause strong pinching of the ablated plasma (Bell et al 1993). In
contrast, the other two mechanisms will occur predominantly at early times (10 fs < t 6 τp )
in interactions at normal and oblique incidence, respectively. For intensities of 1019 W cm−2 ,
the magnitude of the B-field can be 109 G and above.
Short-pulse laser–plasma interactions 779
stop in cold material, so that the total line emission will in general depend upon the target
thickness. The hot electron energy can therefore be inferred from a ‘sandwich’ experiment
(e.g. Al on Si) in which the thickness of the front layer is varied (Hares et al 1979). The
change in the Kα line ratios with thickness can then be fitted to a characteristic temperature
or distribution function.
Although experimental hot temperature measurements in the sub-picosecond regime are
still scarce, a picture is gradually emerging which suggests that
(i) temperatures are lower than for long-pulse experiments at the same intensities,,
(ii) the scaling law is Thot ' (I λ2 )1/3−1/2 .
A summary of these experiments is shown in figure 4 together with results from recent
(one-dimensional) PIC simulations.
Focusing a high-intensity laser pulse into a gas elicits a completely different character
of interaction from that considered in section 3. With solids, the pulse interacts with a
few microns of essentially mirror-like material; with gas targets, the pulse propagates over
millimetres, during which time it can ionize, distort, refract and accelerate particles, and so
on. The interaction physics is therefore determined not only by the spot size σ0 and intensity
I at the focus, but also by the focusing geometry or the Rayleigh diffraction length:
πσ02
ZR = (8)
λ
Short-pulse laser–plasma interactions 781
where σ0 is the 1/e2 spot size, defined for a Gaussian beam by: I (r) = I0 exp(−r 2 /σ02 ). In
this section we describe some of these new effects in nonlinear optics and how they might
be usefully exploited.
were again a number of works appearing at the end of the 1980s pointing out the ways in
which femtosecond pulses should behave differently from longer (pico–nanosecond) pulses
in underdense plasmas.
At first sight, one might think that for laser intensities such that EL Ei , a plasma
would be instantly created by the leading foot of the pulse, leaving the main part propagating
through a fully ionized, uniform plasma. Unfortunately, the situation is complicated by a
phenomenon known as ionization-induced defocusing (Auguste et al 1992a, Leemans et
al 1992, Rae 1993). Near the front of an intense pulse, where the field is close to the
ionization threshold, the gas at the centre of the beam will be ionized more, giving rise to
a steep radial density gradient. The refractive index of the plasma, given by:
Ne (r, z, t) 1/2
η(r, z, t) = 1 − (10)
Nc
will therefore have a minimum on axis and act as a defocusing lens for the rear portion of
the beam. The result is that for high gas pressures, the laser beam is deflected well before
it can reach its nominal focus (Auguste et al 1992a).
To circumvent this problem, experiments requiring high intensities are usually performed
either with a preformed plasma (Durfee III and Milchberg 1993, Mackinnon et al 1995), or
using a gas-jet configuration in which the beam is focused in vacuum before it actually enters
the gas (Auguste et al 1994). Interaction at the maximum intensity is then guaranteed and
one can essentially neglect the ionization physics. It is then possible to study the interaction
of the laser fields with free electrons at intensities of 1018 W cm−2 and above. To see what
new effects can be expected in this regime, it is helpful to examine the wave equation for
an electromagnetic wave in a plasma:
2
∂ Ne A
− c ∇ A = JNL =
2 2
. (11)
∂t 2 γ
The nonlinear current JNL on the right-hand side of (11) contains both the coupling of
the laser field to the plasma and high-intensity effects such as relativistic self-focusing. The
latter effect arises due to a change in the refractive index via electrons quivering in the laser
field at velocities close to the speed of light. This phenomenon has been known for some
time (Litvak 1968, Max et al 1974), but it is only through short-pulse technology that it
has become possible to study it experimentally. The reason for this is that there is a power
threshold (Sprangle et al 1988):
Ne
Pc = 17 GW (12)
Nc
at which beam diffraction is balanced by self-focusing. For typical electron densities
available from a gas jet, namely 1018 –1020 cm−3 , one needs a multi-terawatt laser to have
a reasonable chance of seeing the effect. On the other hand, theoretical and computational
studies have demonstrated that self-focusing should be accompanied by partial or complete
expulsion of electrons from the beam centre (Sun et al 1987, Mori et al 1988, Borisov et
al 1990, Chen and Sudan l993, Pukhov and Meyer-ter-Vehn 1996), forming a kind of self-
sustained optical fibre. Recent experiments have reported evidence of extended propagation
over several Rayleigh lengths (Borisov et al 1992, Sullivan et al 1994, Monot et al 1995b,
Mackinnon et al 1995). However, the interpretation of these results has been complicated
by the fact that the diagnostics used to image the focused beam rely on scattering of the
laser light from plasma electrons (Gibbon et al 1995).
Short-pulse laser–plasma interactions 783
largely confirm the initial growth scaling of the RFS and RBS instabilities but which also
follow them to saturation (Bulanov et al 1992, Decker et al 1994). The state-of-the-
art in this area is currently claimed by the UCLA/LLNL groups, who have been able to
model actual experimental parameters with two-dimensional PIC simulations comprising
over 107 particles (Tzeng et al 1996). These studies have shown that RFS can also
excite large-amplitude plasma waves and induce modulations in the pulse in a manner
indistinguishable from the self-modulational instability observed with fluid models.
Experiments at Livermore and RAL, UK largely corroborate these findings, but the
overall understanding of propagation effects is far from complete. In an experiment using
a 600 fs pulse and a 1 mm helium gas jet, Coverdale et al (1995) demonstrated that up to
50% of the light is scattered out of the focal cone, a result that is apparently at odds with an
experiment performed under very similar conditions at Saclay (France), where collimation
of the exiting beam was observed (Monot et al 1995a).
So far in this review, we have concentrated mainly on the basic physical issues of
femtosecond laser–plasma interactions. While it is true that much current research is
curiosity driven, an equally important motivating factor is the extent to which laser-plasmas
can be used as primary sources of photons and electrons for other purposes. From the
preceding sections, it should by now be clear that there are basically three main areas of
application:
In this section we consider some specific applications in a little more detail, where possible
comparing laser-plasma sources with more traditional ones. As far as the x-ray sources
are concerned, a vital component of any successful application will be the development of
suitable optics for the x-ray photons, which in many cases is a technological challenge in
itself (Förster et al 1992, 1994, Attwood 1992).
electrons is their ability to pass less destructively through aqueous solutions. Moreover,
scanning electron microscopy normally requires carefully prepared biological samples, either
freeze-dried or treated with hydrophobic agents, a process which can alter the cellular
structure. With soft x-ray pulses from laser-produced plasmas (section 3.3), on the other
hand, one can imagine studying living cells with a time resolution sufficient to capture
dynamical processes on a sub-nanosecond timescale.
Apart from good temporal coherence, a prerequisite for biological holography is a
wavelength within the so-called ‘water-window’ between the absorption K-edges of oxygen
(23.2 Å) and carbon (43.7 Å) (Solem and Chapline 1984). This choice allows transmission
of the probe beam through the sample while providing natural contrast between proteins
(i.e. carbon) and water (oxygen). For example, this should yield information on protein
structures in their natural (aqueous) environment.
An important application of coherent XUV sources which is quite widespread is plasma
density diagnosis. In ICF and astrophysical plasmas, densities can be well above the critical
density Nc ' 1021 λ−2 −2
µ cm , which make them difficult or impossible to probe with visible
or UV lasers. A soft x-ray laser with λ < 20 nm, on the other hand, has a critical density of
1024 cm−3 or above, and can be used to obtain the plasma density using interferometry (Da
Silva et al 1995). An added advantage of ultrafast XUV schemes would be an improvement
in spatial resolution to sub-micron levels, by freezing hydrodynamic motion.
Diffractometry exploits the interference effect created by adjacent atomic planes (Bragg
scattering) to obtain global structural information about fluid or crystal samples. Since x-
ray diffraction measurements can be directly inverted to atomic positions or bond lengths,
it is conceivable that ultrafast exposures on the 100 fs timescale would ultimately allow
‘filming’ of dynamic processes such as phase changes or chemical reactions (Barty et al
1995). Progress towards this goal has been recently achieved by Tomov et al (1995) using a
scheme similar to that shown in figure 5(b). They demonstrated a pump–probe experiment
to observe changes in the lattice temperature of a gold crystal on a 10 ps timescale.
Spectroscopy can also reveal information on atomic structure, but its interpretation
is generally complicated by uncertainties in bulk properties. An exception to this is
extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), which yields direct information on the
near neighbours of a given atom. Soft x-rays from laser-plasmas have been successfully
Short-pulse laser–plasma interactions 787
(a)
(b)
Figure 5. X-ray optical arrangements for (a) pump–probe diffractometry and (b) ultrafast
absorption spectroscopy.
used as EXAFS sources for some time owing to their high brightness and sub-nanosecond
recording capability (Eason et al 1984). Again, short-pulse sources have been proposed as
a means of extending the time resolution down to the sub-picosecond regime (Tallents et al
1990). An advantage of spectroscopic techniques over diffractometry is that the required
x-ray photon flux is several orders of magnitude lower. Preliminary proof-of-principle
experiments have none the less concentrated on the near-edge spectrum (XANES), where
the source and detection requirements can be relaxed even further (Ráksi et al 1995).
788 P Gibbon and E Förster
5.4. Lithography
While lithography is often cited as a potential application for laser-plasma x-ray sources,
it is not obvious that ultrashort-pulse lengths bring any real advantage. To the authors’
knowledge, short-pulse systems have not yet been seriously evaluated in the context. In
order to use lasers for x-ray exposure of resists, one needs a short, tunable wavelength
(around 10 Å) for high resolution, combined with high average power to meet throughput
requirements. This does not rule out short-pulse x-ray sources in special cases, but
nanosecond lasers currently appear to represent the most promising option in this field
(Chaker et al 1990, Maldonado 1995).
be limited by other factors, such as laser diffraction or instabilities. For example, comparing
the Rayleigh length (8) with (21), we typically have ZR La , so some means of guiding
the laser beam over the dephasing length must be found to optimize the energy coupling.
Whether relativistic or channel guiding (section 4.2) can be combined with large-amplitude
plasma wave generation has yet to be proven experimentally, but this will be one of the
goals of ‘second generation’ plasma-based accelerators in the near future, see Katsouleas and
Bingham (1996). To date, there have been some notable experiments demonstrating particle
acceleration with a beat-wave scheme (Kitagawa et al 1992, Clayton et al 1993, Everett
et al 1994, Amiranoff et al 1995). First experiments with short-pulse lasers (Nakajima et
al 1995, Modena et al 1995) have also achieved acceleration of thermal electrons to over
40 MeV, but the underlying mechanism has been attributed to Raman instabilities rather
than to ‘clean’ wakefield excitation. In an important step towards the latter, radial plasma
waves generated by ‘cigar-shaped’ pulses have been observed with both temporal and spatial
resolution by the LULI group (Marquès et al 1996).
6. Summary
changing emphasis in physics, from weakly nonlinear optics to extreme relativistic, kinetic
processes, which has accompanied these developments. In addition, we have explored some
of the areas in which femtosecond laser-produced plasmas show great promise as sources
of fast particles and short-wavelength radiation. With a new generation of high repetition-
rate, multi-terawatt lasers coming online this year, we can expect many of these ultrafast
applications to be realized in the near future.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to a number of colleagues who have provided valuable advice, comments
and, in some cases, unpublished material, notably: A Andreev, A R Bell, C B Darrow,
G Hölzer, J C Gauthier, J C Kieffer, T Missalla, S Svanberg, U Teubner, R P J Town and
I Uschmann.
References