Creating and Controlling Plasma-Based Optical Elements

Replacing conventional optical elements with plasma-based optical elements will allow for the manipulation of unprecedented laser intensities. This may enable dynamic manipulation of laser focusing and polarization, at ultrafast time scales, and intensities that are far beyond the optics damage threshold of crystal-based photonics devices. The challenge is to create novel, robust, optical elements on nanosecond timescales. In one approach
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, we create large amplitude nonlinear ion acoustic waves which can act as Bragg structures. The general method of autoresonance is employed to excite and control the structures. Simple analytic and numerical models predict1 relative plasma density modulations greater than unity. The second scheme is to control2 the polarization of a light wave via its interaction with an auxiliary beam in a plasma.