Steve Hawkes

TL;DR: A hybrid acceleration scheme based on the relativistic induced transparency mechanism using linearly polarised laser interaction with foil targets is demonstrated and its future implication in using high power lasers is explored.

TL;DR: In this article, the multi-million-electron-volt proton beams accelerated during high-intensity laser-solid interactions have been used as a particle probe to investigate the electric charging of microscopic targets laser-irradiated at intensity ∼1019 W cm2.

TL;DR: This work combines the techniques of beam homogenisation and double-pass pumping of a lightly-doped crystal with a new index-matched absorber liquid and demonstrates that this combined approach successfully overcomes the problem of gain depletion by ASE in a high-energy Ti:sapphire amplifier.

TL;DR: An experimental study of the "coherent" contrast feature that frequently appears in petawatt(PW)-class laser pulses as an exponentially-rising pedestal within a few tens of picoseconds of the compressed pulse shows that scattering from the diffraction gratings in the stretcher is the principal source of this feature.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated experimentally and numerically via 3D particle-in-cell simulations that the degree of ellipticity of the laser polarization strongly influences the spatial-intensity distribution of the beam of multi-MeV protons.