Hydrodynamic Impacts of Short Laser Pulses on Plasmas

Abstract

We determine conditions allowing for simplification of the description of the impact of a short and arbitrarily intense laser pulse onto a cold plasma at rest. If both the initial plasma density and pulse profile have plane symmetry, then suitable matched upper bounds on the maximum and the relative variations of the initial density, as well as on the intensity and duration of the pulse, ensure a strictly hydrodynamic evolution of the electron fluid without wave-breaking or vacuum-heating during its whole interaction with the pulse, while ions can be regarded as immobile. We use a recently developed fully relativistic plane model whereby the system of the Lorentz–Maxwell and continuity PDEs is reduced into a family of highly nonlinear but decoupled systems of non-autonomous Hamilton equations with one degree of freedom, the light-like coordinate ξ=ct−z instead of time t as an independent variable, and new a priori estimates (eased by use of a Liapunov function) of the solutions in terms of the input data (i.e., the initial density and pulse profile). If the laser spot radius R is finite and is not too small, the same conclusions hold for the part of the plasma close to the axis z→ of cylindrical symmetry. These results may help in drastically simplifying the study of extreme acceleration mechanisms of electrons.