Optimization of the beam quality in ionization injection by a tailoring gas profile

A new scheme is proposed to improve the electron beam quality of ionization-induced injection by tailoring gas profile in laser wakefield acceleration. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that the ionization-induced injection mainly occurs in high-density stage and automatically truncates in low-density stage due to the decrease of the wakefield potential difference. The beam loading can be compensated by the elongated beam resulting from the density transition stage. The beam quality can be improved by shorter injection distance and beam loading effect. A quasi-monoenergetic electron beam with a central energy of 258 Me V and an energy spread of 5.1% is obtained under certain laser–plasma conditions.     

Selection and optimization of mirror structure of off-axis two-mirror afocal system北大核心CSCD

According to the structural characteristics of aspheric off-axis two-mirror optical system, the imaging characteristics of the system were analyzed by using primary aberration theory. Based on the characteristics of different aspheric surfaces, the vector expression of system aberrations was derived. Using the Seidel coefficients, the primary wave aberration of systems were expanded and values of system aberration for different aspheric surface shapes were specifically calculated. After the evaluation index of the off-axis structure was determined, the imaging qualities of different surface shape combinations were compared. Then the optimal surface shape selection method was analyzed by quantitative comparison results. The results show that compared with other reflector combination methods, the spherical aberration, coma and astigmatism of the off-axis double paraboloid system are all 0, the wavefront RMS is much better than λ/14 (λ=0.587 6 μm), and the Strehl ratio is greater than 0.8. According to the calculation results, it not only has a stronger ability to suppress multiple primary aberrations, but also can effectively compress the volume of the system. Copyright ©2022 Journal of Applied Optics. All rights reserved.     

Electron self-injection and acceleration in a hollow plasma channel driven by ultrashort intense laser pulses

The self-injection and acceleration of electrons in a hollow plasma channel driven by ultrashort intense laser pulses is investigated by Particle-in-Cell(PIC) simulations. It is shown that electrons from the bubble sheath will be self-injected into the hollow plasma channel and move radially towards the channel border due to the lack of focusing force in the hollow plasma channel. After several reflections near the channel wall by the strong focusing force, a self-injected electron bunch can be confined in the hollow plasma channel and quasi-phase-stably accelerated forward for the whole laser–plasma interaction process. These electrons using optical and plasma-related self-injection method can be self-organized to remain in the rear of the bubble, where the accelerating electric field is transversely uniform and nearly plateau along the propagation axis. Therefore, the self-injected electron bunch can be accelerated in a steady state without obvious oscillation and has a high quality with narrow energy spread and low divergence.     

Thermal Diffusivity of Film/Substrate Structures Characterized by Transient Thermal Grating Method

Transient thermal grating method is used to measure the thermal diffusivity of absorbing films deposited on transparent substrates. According to periodically modulated dielectric constant variations and thermoelastic deformations of the thin films caused by the transient thermal gratings, an improved optical diffraction theory is presented. In the experiment, the probing laser beam reflectively diffracted by the thermal grating is measured by a photomultiplier at different grating fringe spaces. The thermal diffusivity of the film can be evaluated by fitting the theoretical calculations of diffraction signals to the experimental measured data. The validity of the method is tested by measuring the thermal diffusivities of absorbing ZnO films deposited on glass substrates.     

Numerical simulation of super-continuum laser propagation in turbulent atmosphere

Considering the atmospheric extinction and turbulence effects,we investigate the propagation performances of supercontinuum laser sources in atmospheric turbulence statistically by using the numerical simulation method,and the differences in propagation properties between the super-continuum(SC)laser and its pump laser are also analyzed.It is found that the propagation characteristics of super-continuum laser are almost similar to those of the pump laser.The degradation of source coherence degree may cause the relative beam spreading and scintillation indexes to decrease at different propagation distances or different turbulence strengths.The root-mean-square value of beam wandering is insensitive to the variation of source correlation length,and less aperture averaging occurs when the laser source becomes less coherent.Additionally,from the point of view of beam wandering,the SC laser has no advantage over the pump laser.Although the pump laser can bring about a bigger aperture average,the SC laser has a lower scintillation which may be due to the multiple wavelength homogenization effects on intensity fluctuations.This would be the most important virtue of the SC laser that can be utilized to improve the performance of laser engineering.     

Effects of light intensity on reflective ghost imaging

In this letter, we analyze the effects of light intensity find that the brightness of reflective ghost image can on reflective ghost imaging with thermal source. We be changed by modulating the light intensity of the source and the splitting ratio of the beam splitter. The signal-to-noise ratio will be improved by increa.sing the light intensity of the source. More important, we can obtain the reflective ghost image with high image quality by adopting a low light intensity signal beam and a high light intensity reference beam, which is better than the classical optical imaging, because it can reduce the effects of light on the object.     

Rotational motions of optically trapped microscopic particles by a vortex femtosecond laser

The rotational motions of the optically trapped microscopic particles by the vortex femtosecond laser beam are investigated in this paper.Black particles can be trapped and rotated by a vortex femtosecond laser beam very effectively because the vortex beam carries orbital angular momentum due to the helical wave-front structure in assoication with the central phase singularity.Trapped black particles rotate in the vortex beam due to the absorption of the angular momentum transferred from the vortex beam.The rotating directions of the trapped particles can be modulated by reversing the topological charge of the optical vortex in the vortex femtosecond beam.And the rotating speeds of the trapped microscopic particles greatly depend on the topological charges of the vortex tweezer and the used pulse energies.     

Influence of laser mode on splitting beam illumination effect of Dammann grating

The influences of various laser modes on the splitting beam effect of Dammann grating are studied in theory and by numerical simulation. The results show that fundamental mode laser resembles plane wave while high order mode laser differs from plane wave in the splitting beam effect by Dammann grating. Therefore, the fundamental mode laser is more suitable to be the light source to improve the energy efficiency in far-distance image detecting systems, such as laser image ladar, which use Dammann grating in the ilhlmination svstem.     

Influence of spherical aberrations on fundamental mode beam quality under different laser resonators

Spherical aberrations of the thermal lens of the active media are severe when solid state lasers are strongly pumped.The fundamental mode profile deteriorates due to the aberrations.Self-consistent modes of a resonator with aberrations are calculated by using the Fox-Li diffraction iterative algorithm.Calculation results show that the aberration induced fundamental mode beam quality deterioration depends greatly on the resonator design.The tolerance of a flat-flat resonator to the aberration coefficient is about 30λ in the middle of stability,where λ is the wavelength of laser beam.But for a dynamically stable resonator,2λ of spherical aberration will create diffraction loss of more than 40%,if inappropriate design criteria are used.A birefringence compensated laser resonator with two Nd:YAG rods is experimentally studied.The experimental data are in quite good agreement with simulation results.     

Phase-Locked Fibre Array for Coherent Combination and Atmosphere Aberration Compensation

We report a fibre amplifier array that not only achieves coherent beam combination by compensation of phase noises of fibre amplifier, but also accomplishes correction of atmosphere aberration. It is of master-oscillatormultiple-amplifier （MOPA） configuration, which can be phase-locked by the multidither principle or heterodyne detection principle. First laboratory experiments of atmosphere aberration compensation of a three-element fibre amplifier array are reported. The atmosphere aberration is created by a phase screen in the experiment. The phase changes of the beam, which are introduced by the fibre amplifier and the phase screen, are both detected by the heterodyne detection method. Phase modulators are controlled to compensate for the phase in the three paths. No matter whether there is a phase screen producing atmosphere aberration or not, the dim dynamic interference fringes in the far field turn to a clear and stable pattern, and the peak intensity is maximized. It is indicated that the fibre amplifier array is phase-locked, and coherent combination of the three beams is achieved. It can be used not only to obtain high power fibre laser array but also in laser space communication.