High-pressure metal hydride (MH) research evolved into a thriving field within condensed matter physics following the realization of metallic compounds showing phonon mediated near room-temperature superconductivity. However, severe limitations in determining the chemical formula of the reaction products, especially with regards to their hydrogen content, impedes a deep understanding of the synthesized phases and can lead to significantly erroneous conclusions. Here, we present a way to directly access the hydrogen content of MH solids synthesized at high pressures in (laser-heated) diamond anvil cells using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We show that this method can be used to investigate MH compounds with a wide range of hydrogen content, from MHx with x = 0.15 (CuH0.15) to x ≲ 6.4 (H6±0.4S5).

Ultraintense short-period infrared laser pulses play an important role in frontier scientific research, but their power is quite low when generated using current technology. This paper demonstrates a scheme for generating an ultraintense few-cycle infrared pulse by directly compressing a long infrared pulse. In this scheme, an infrared picosecond-to-nanosecond laser pulse counterpropagates with a rapidly extending plasma grating that is created by ionizing an undulated gas by a short laser pulse, and the infrared laser pulse is reflected by the rapidly extending plasma grating. Because of the high expansion velocity of the latter, the infrared laser pulse is compressed in the reflection process. One- and two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that by this method, a pulse with a duration of tens of picoseconds in the mid- to far-infrared range can be compressed to a few cycles with an efficiency exceeding 60%, thereby making ultraintense few-cycle infrared pulses possible.

A system of reduced equations is proposed for electron motion in the strongly radiation-dominated regime for an arbitrary electromagnetic field configuration. The approach developed here is used to analyze various scenarios of electron dynamics in this regime: motion in rotating electric and magnetic fields and longitudinal acceleration in a plane wave and in a plasma wakefield. The results obtained show that this approach is able to describe features of electron dynamics that are essential in certain scenarios, but cannot be captured in the framework of the original radiation-free approximation [Samsonov et al., Phys. Rev. A 98, 053858 (2018) and A. Gonoskov and M. Marklund, Phys. Plasmas 25, 093109 (2018)]. The results are verified by numerical integration of the nonreduced equations of motion with account taken of radiation reaction in both semiclassical and fully quantum cases.

We present a novel scheme for dense electron acceleration driven by the laser irradiation of a near-critical-density plasma. The electron reflux effect in a transversely tailored plasma is particularly enhanced in the area of peak density. We observe a bubble-like distribution of re-injected electrons, which forms a strong quasistatic electromagnetic field that can accelerate electrons longitudinally while also preserving the electron transverse emittance. Simulation results demonstrate that over-dense electrons could be trapped in such an artificial bubble and accelerated to an energy of ∼500MeV. The obtained relativistic electron beam can reach a total charge of up to 0.26 nC and is well collimated with a small divergence of 17 mrad. Moreover, the wavelength of electron oscillation is noticeably reduced due to the shaking of the bubble structure in the laser field. As a result, the energy of the produced photons is substantially increased to the γ range. This new regime provides a path to generating high-charge electron beams and high-energy γ-ray sources.

A neural network-based approach is proposed both for reconstructing the focal spot intensity profile and for estimating the peak intensity of a high-power tightly focused laser pulse using the angular energy distributions of protons accelerated by the pulse from rarefied gases. For these purposes, we use a convolutional neural network architecture. Training and testing datasets are calculated using the test particle method, with the laser description in the form of Stratton–Chu integrals, which model laser pulses focused by an off-axis parabolic mirror down to the diffraction limit. To demonstrate the power and robustness of this method, we discuss the reconstruction of axially symmetric intensity profiles for laser pulses with intensities and focal diameters in the ranges of 1021–1023 W cm-2 and ∼(1–4)λ, respectively. This approach has prospects for implementation at higher intensities and with asymmetric laser beams, and it can provide a valuable diagnostic method for emerging extremely intense laser facilities.

The inverse Faraday effect (IFE), which usually refers to the phenomenon in which a quasi-static axial magnetic field is self-generated when a circularly polarized beam propagates in a plasma, has rarely been studied for lasers with unconventional polarization states. In this paper, IFE is reconsidered for weakly relativistic full Poincaré beams, which can contain all possible laser polarization states. Starting from cold electron fluid equations and the conservation of generalized vorticity, a self-consistent theoretical model combining the nonlinear azimuthal current and diamagnetic current is presented. The theoretical results show that when such a laser propagates in a plasma, an azimuthally varying quasi-static axial magnetic field can be generated, which is quite different from the circularly polarized case. These results are qualitatively and quantitatively verified by three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Our work extends the theoretical understanding of the IFE and provides a new degree of freedom in the design of magnetized plasma devices.

The effect of ablation on the nonlinear spike growth of single-mode ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) is studied by two-dimensional numerical simulations. It is shown that the ablation can reduce the quasi-constant velocity and significantly suppress the reacceleration of the spike in the nonlinear phase. It is also shown that the spike growth can affect the ablation-generated vorticity inside the bubble, which further affects the nonlinear bubble acceleration. The vorticity evolution is found to be correlated with the mixing width (i.e., the sum of the bubble and spike growths) for a given wave number and ablation velocity. By considering the effects of mass ablation and vorticity, an analytical model for the nonlinear bubble and spike growth of single-mode ablative RTI is developed in this study. It is found that the nonlinear growth of the mixing width, induced by the single mode, is dominated by the bubble growth for small-scale ablative RTI, whereas it is dominated by the spike growth for classical RTI.