Side-view density profiles of a laser-induced plasma were measured by a home-built, time-resolved, Mach–Zehnder-like interferometer. Due to the pump-probe femtosecond resolution of the measurements, the plasma dynamics was observed, along with the pump pulse propagation. The effects of impact ionization and recombination were evidenced during the plasma evolution up to hundreds of picoseconds. This measurement system will integrate our laboratory infrastructure as a key tool for diagnosing gas targets and laser-target interaction in laser wakefield acceleration experiments.

Laser wakefield electron acceleration with ionization injection has rarely been studied in the low-power, self-modulated case. We performed simulations of such regimes using a mixture of He and N2 gases and driven by laser pulses with peak powers around 1 TW. Analyses show the generation of electron bunches with an average energy of up to 70 MeV, an energy spread as low as 18%, and an emittance as good as a fraction of a mm mrad. The obtained electron beam parameters lead to several trade-offs as a function of N2 concentration, allowing for many different designs.

This work presents data obtained from optogalvanic spectroscopy (OGS) of dysprosium (Dy) using a commercial hollow cathode lamp. Combining laser beams from two tunable dye lasers, it was possible to identify 13 electronic transitions from excited states of the atom not observed or registered in published papers and the NIST database; these lines were observed between 555–575 nm and 585–615 nm. The study of 13 two-step transitions found in this work complement the available data for the Dy which may support other research or any work using this atom.