Supriya Rajhans
Doctoral candidate
Doctoral project
Few-cycle laser pulses for compact plasma accelerators
The main objective of this project is to develop a laser source at high average power and short pulse duration optimized for laser-plasma acceleration (LPA). In contrast to common laser-plasma accelerators today, these parameters promise operation of plasma accelerators at high repetition rates and average power.
A general scheme for obtaining ultrashort pulses involves spectral broadening of optical pulses using self-phase modulation followed by temporal compression in a negative dispersion system. In this work, novel post compression techniques are being explored for multi mJ lasers operated at high average powers. Methods will be developed to push the generated high average power short pulse source towards single cycle regime while maximizing the peak power of the compressed pulses, optimized by novel pulse shaping methods to meet the demands of compact plasma accelerators.