It is shown that in the focus of ultra-short pulses of duration t, the equivalent relation s = ct, where c is the speed of light and s the spatial extent of the pulse of the collimated pulse, does not hold. While the duration of one pulse is constant and independent of the measurement point, the spatial extension of the ultra-short pulse can be spatially shorter a factor more than 10 compared to the one obtained from the usual relation. The result is explained in correspondence with the extension of the Rayleigh range. Few femtosecond long gamma bursts can thus be generated in Thomson backscattering experiments performed in the lambda cube regime.

The development of graphene-based materials for optical limiting functionality is an active field of research. Optical limiting for femtosecond laser pulses in the infrared-B (IR-B) (1.4–3 μm) spectral domain has been investigated to a lesser extent than that for nanosecond, picosecond and femtosecond laser pulses at wavelengths up to 1.1 μm. Novel nonlinear optical materials, glassy graphene oxide (GO)-based silico-phosphate composites, were prepared, for the first time to our knowledge, by a convenient and low cost sol-gel method, as described in the paper, using tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), H3PO4 and GO/reduced GO (rGO) as precursors. The characterisation of the GO/rGO silico-phosphate composite films was performed by spectroscopy (Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR), Ultraviolet–Visible-Near Infrared (UV-VIS-NIR) and Raman) and microscopy (atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscope (SEM)) techniques. H3PO4 was found to reduce the rGO dispersed in the precursor’s solution with the formation of vertically agglomerated rGO sheets, uniformly distributed on the substrate surface. The capability of these novel graphene oxide-based materials for the optical limiting of femtosecond laser pulses at 1550 nm wavelength was demonstrated by intensity-scan experiments. The GO or rGO presence in the film, their concentrations, the composite films glassy matrix, and the film substrate influence the optical limiting performance of these novel materials and are discussed accordingly.

We propose new nanotargets as nano-layered flat-top cone targets to be used for future laser-ion acceleration experiments at ELI-NP. We study their behaviour at the interaction with an ultra-high intensity laser pulse by performing Particle-In-Cell simulations. We analyze spatio-temporal the electromagnetic field based on the finite-difference time-domain method for a complementary description. We find the optimum diameter of the nanospheres and the proper nano-flat-top foil thickness for which one can obtain monoenergetic beams of very energetic ions with low angular divergence.

Non-collinear spectral coherent combining (NCSCC) of ultrashort pulses is analyzed. 2D modeling of the electromagnetic field is performed in case of NCSCC using two or three pulses with different wavelengths. In the case of two pulses, a potentially unwanted spatio-temporal structure of the field appears, corresponding to spatial and temporal modulation of the pulse. By using NCSCC of three 62 fs long pulses with different spectral composition, such spatial-temporal coupling is eliminated and the combined pulse duration in the focal region drops to less than half. The method is scalable to a large number of ultrashort pulses.

A versatile method to enhance the laser pulse intensity by one order of magnitude from 8 × 10 20 W / c m 2 using a single plastic micro-cone target is proposed in this Letter. We found an increase of the initial laser pulse intensity by more than 10 times for a micro-cone tip diameter of 5 µm upon performing two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Numerical simulations of the spatio-temporal electromagnetic field distribution are used to replicate similar dependence of the maximum laser intensity to the cone tip diameter.