The forward ponderomotive force associated with an intense short laser pulse, propagating in a tenuous plasma, accelerates the electrons to velocities higher than the group velocity of the laser. In this work, a simple general solution for ponderomotive acceleration is presented for arbitrary polarization. The circular polarization is more efficient than linear polarization, since the threshold laser intensity needed for electron acceleration is lower for a circularly polarized laser pulse.

We employ a Monte Carlo ray-tracing code along with the ANSYS package to predict the optical and structural behavior in end-pumped CW Yb:YAG disk lasers. The presence of inhomogeneous temperature, stress, and strain distributions is responsible for many deleterious effects for laser action through disk fracture, strain-induced birefringence, and thermal lensing. The thermal lensing, in turn, results in the optical phase distortion in solid-state lasers. Furthermore, the dependence of optical phase distortion on variables such as the heat transfer coefficient, the cooling fluid temperature, and crystal thickness is discussed.

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The trapping and acceleration of an electron by forward ponderomotive force associated with intense short laser pulses, propagating in homogeneous rarefied plasmas is analyzed. This is done not by solving the motion equations but by energy conservation law and Lorentz transformation. This method is able to the treat the ponderomotive acceleration regardless of laser polarization. It is shown that the gain of acceleration increases linearly with the field strength of the laser and the relativistic factor of the group velocity of the laser in the plasma, while the minimum injection energy necessary for trapping the electron decreases with the laser field strength and increases slowly with the group velocity of the laser.

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