Enhancement of laser focused intensity greater than 10 times through a re-entrant cone in the petawatt regime

O. Budriga, L. E. Ionel, D. Tatomirescu, and K. A. Tanaka [ https://www.osapublishing.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-45-13-3454 ]

A simple method to amplify the laser pulse intensity by an order of magnitude from 8x10²⁰ W/cm² using a plastic re-entrant micro-cone target is proposed. We found an increase of the initial laser pulse intensity by more than 10 times for a micro-cone tip diameter of 5 μm upon performing two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.
Numerical simulations of the spatio-temporal electromagnetic field distribution are used to replicate similar dependence of the maximum laser intensity to the cone tip diameter.

The physics for this amplification is to make use of the squeezing effect of the incoming laser beam with the cone focusing shape and the interference effect of all coming laser rays onto the tip of the cone. In near future we plan to study this scheme to obtain more than 8x10²⁴ W/cm² focused intensity that corresponds to a 100 PW laser output.

25 fsec 10 PW laser pulse enters the re-entrant micro cone. The laser pulse is guided toward the 5 μm (micron) diameter cone tip to amplify the focused intensity.