Speaker
Description
This work presents recent results on the interaction of structured light with plasmas. Experimental and modelling results unveil its potential applications in plasma diagnosis, especially in the fields of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), plasma based soft X-ray lasers and Laboratory Astrophysics. The full propagation + interaction with plasma process can be modelled using our multiscale, multiphysics computational framework [1]. This framework takes into account plasma creation and its posterior hydrodynamic expansion; the related collisional and radiative processes; and the propagation and amplification of UV/XUV beams.
The interaction of structured IR beams (taking advantage of spatio-temporal couplings to implement a flying focus) [2] and the posterior interaction of High Order Harmonics carrying Orbital Angular Momentum will be presented, stressing applications towards diagnosing hot, dense plasmas [3,4,5], by measuring the perturbation of the HOH wavefront after propagation through the plasma and relating this perturbation to the electron density and its gradient. Finally, we will present the generation of Stokes skyrmions from second harmonic generation in nitrogen plasmas [6].
Figure 1: (left) 3D intensity distribution of an amplified XUV seed carrying OAM along with ASE. (right) Initial (upper figure) wavefront of a l=25 Laguerre-Gauss HOH and perturbed wavefront (lower figure) of the same HOH after amplification through a plasma.
Notes and References
1 E. Oliva, et al, “3D multi-scale modelling of plasma-based seeded soft X-ray lasers”, The European Physical Journal D, 75, 11 (2021)
2 A. Kabacinski, et al, “Spatio-temporal couplings for controlling group velocity in longitudinally pumped seeded soft X-ray lasers”, Nat. Phot. 17, 345-359 (2023)
3 F. Tuitje, et al, “Nonlinear ionization dynamics of hot dense plasma observed in a laser-plasma amplifier”, Light: Sci Appl, 9, 1 (2020)
4 S. López, et al, “Conservation of Orbital Angular Momentum throughout amplification of high order harmonics in Ni-like krypton and silver plasmas”, Opt. Exp., 31, 5, 8465-8478 (2023)
5 S. López, et al, “Diagnosing the electron density of plasma amplifiers using XUV vortex beams”, Opt. Exp., 33, 22, 46285-46303 (2025)
6 M. G. Barriopedro, E. Oliva and M. A. Porras, “Spontaneous optical skyrmion generation by frequency doubling in underdense plasmas”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03145 (2026)