Highly efficient generation of GV/m-level terahertz pulses from intense femtosecond laser-foil interactions

Hong-Yi Lei; Fang-Zheng Sun; Tian-Ze Wang; Hao Chen; Dan Wang; Yan-Yu Wei; Jing-Long Ma; Guo-Qian Liao; Yu-Tong Li

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104336

Highly efficient generation of GV/m-level terahertz pulses from intense femtosecond laser-foil interactions

iScience. 2022 Apr 30;25(5):104336. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104336. eCollection 2022 May 20.

Authors

Hong-Yi Lei^{1

2}, Fang-Zheng Sun^{1

2}, Tian-Ze Wang¹, Hao Chen^{1

2}, Dan Wang^{1

2}, Yan-Yu Wei^{1

2}, Jing-Long Ma¹, Guo-Qian Liao^{1

3}, Yu-Tong Li^{1

2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
² School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan 523808, Guangdong, China.
⁴ Collaborative Innovation Center of IFSA (CICIFSA), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.

Abstract

The terahertz radiation from ultraintense laser-produced plasmas has aroused increasing attention recently as a promising approach toward strong terahertz sources. Here, we present the highly efficient production of millijoule-level terahertz pulses, from the rear side of a metal foil irradiated by a 10-TW femtosecond laser pulse. By characterizing the terahertz and electron emission in combination with particle-in-cell simulations, the physical reasons behind the efficient terahertz generation are discussed. The resulting focused terahertz electric field strength reaches over 2 GV/m, which is justified by experiments on terahertz strong-field-driven nonlinearity in semiconductors.

Keywords: laser; radiation physics; surface science.