Nonlinear plasma optics, magnetized plasmas, magnetic reconnection, laser-driven QED processes

With the ever increasing laser intensities now created in high-power laser facilities, high-intensity (greater than 10^18 W/cm^2 for laser wavelenghth ~ 1 micron) laser interaction with plasmas has attracted a great deal of interest over the last three decades and has emerged as a unique platform for creating ultra-compact dense particle and radiation sources (ranging from long-wavelength Terahertz to ultra-short wavelength intense gamma rays), for studying relativistic plasma optical phenomena, for creating extreme laboratory conditions that can mimic astrophysical processes, and for probing high-field quantum electrodynamics, etc.

This is a very dynamic field of research that has received world-wide interest and generated fruitful products that hold promising applications in basic sciences, industry, biology, and medicine, etc. Due to these huge impacts, the 2018 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to the inventors of the CPA (chirped pulse amplification) technique, which paved the way to today’s enormously intense laser strengths achieved in the laboratory.

Together with collaborators, our work has dealt with a wide range of topics, e.g. intense x-ray harmonics generation, relativistic optics in strongly magnetized plasmas, laboratory magnetic reconnection, and strong-field QED cascades.

In the future, I plan to take advantage of the LaserNetUS capabilities and collaborate on topics that can be studied using integrated experiments, simulations and theoretical analyses.

J. Mu, F.-Y. Li, Z.-M. Sheng, and J. Zhang, Effect of transverse magnetic fields on high-harmonic generation in intense laser-solid interaction, Laser and Particle Beams, 34, 545 (2016).

T. Wilson, F.-Y. Li, M. Weikum, and Z.-M. Sheng, Influence of strong magnetic fields on laser pulse propagation in underdense plasma, Plasma Phys. Controlled Fusion, 59, 065002 (2017).

T. Wilson, F.-Y. Li, S.-M. Weng, M. Chen, P. McKenna, and Z.-M. Sheng, Laser pulse compression towards collapse and beyond in plasma, J. Phys. B: Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics, 52, 055403 (2019).

Y.-Y. Wang, F.-Y. Li, M. Chen, S.-M. Weng, Q.-M. Lu, Q.-L. Dong, Z.-M. Sheng, and J. Zhang, Magnetic field annihilation and reconnection driven by femtosecond lasers in inhomogeneous plasma, Sci. China Phys. 60, 115211 (2017).

S.-X. Luan, W. Yu, F.-Y. Li, D. Wu, Z.-M. Sheng, M.-Y. Yu, and J. Zhang, Laser propagation in dense magnetized plasma, 94, 053207, Physical Review E (2016).

W. Luo, W.-Y. Liu, T. Yuan, M. Chen, J.-Y. Yu, F.-Y. Li, D. Sorbo, C. P. Ridgers, and Z.-M. Sheng, QED cascade saturation in extreme high fields, Scientific reports, 8, 8400 (2018).