Plasma-based creation of short light pulses: Analysis and simulation of amplification and focusing

Plasmas can serve as damage-less optics for amplifying and focusing light pulses to very high intensity. This provides a way to overcome the limitations of solid-state optical materials as a damage threshold in the classical sense is absent. The amplification process relies on parametric processes in plasmas exploiting the coupling of transverse electromagnetic waves to a longitudinal plasma wave. The plasma response can either be an electron plasma wave (stimulated Raman scattering), an ion-acoustic wave (stimulated Brillouin scattering) or a more complicated non-resonant feature in the case of very short pulses.