Peer-Review Publications

We show that coherent harmonic focusing provides an efficient mechanism to boost all-optical signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearity in the collision of high-intensity laser fields, thereby offering a promising route to their first experimental detection. Assuming two laser pulses of given parameters at our disposal, we demonstrate a substantial increase of the number of signal photons measurable in experiments where one of the pulses undergoes coherent harmonic focusing before it collides with the fundamental-frequency pulse. Imposing a quantitative criterion to discern the signal photons from the background of the driving laser photons and accounting for the finite purity of polarization filtering, we find that signal photons arising from inelastic scattering processes constitute a promising signature. By contrast, quasielastic contributions which are conventionally assumed to form the most prospective signal remain background dominated. Our findings may result in a paradigm shift concerning which photonic signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearity are accessible in experiment.

Precise calculations of the isotope shifts in berylliumlike thorium and uranium ions are presented. The main contributions to the field and mass shifts are calculated within the framework of the Dirac–Coulomb–Breit Hamiltonian employing the configuration-interaction Dirac–Fock–Sturm method. These calculations include the relativistic, electron–electron correlation, and Breit-interaction effects. The QED, nuclear deformation, and nuclear polarization corrections are also evaluated.

The first experimental investigation of the electron affinity (EA) of a radioactive isotope has been conducted at the CERN-ISOLDE radioactive ion beam facility. The EA of the radioactive iodine isotope ¹²⁸I (t 1/2 = 25 min) was determined to be 3.059 052(38) eV. The experiment was conducted using the newly developed Gothenburg ANion Detector for Affinity measurements by Laser PHotodetachment (GANDALPH) apparatus, connected to a CERN-ISOLDE experimental beamline. ¹²⁸I was produced in fission induced by 1.4 GeV protons striking a thorium/tantalum foil target and then extracted as singly charged negative ions at a beam energy of 20 keV. Laser photodetachment of the fast ion beam was performed in a collinear geometry inside the GANDALPH chamber. Neutral atoms produced in the photodetachment process were detected by allowing them to impinge on a glass surface, creating secondary electrons which were then detected using a channel electron multiplier. The photon energy of the laser was tuned across the threshold of the photodetachment process and the detachment threshold data were fitted to a Wigner law function in order to extract the EA. This first successful demonstration of photodetachment at an isotope separator on line facility opens up the opportunity for future studies of the fundamental properties of negatively charged radioactive isotopes such as the EA of astatine and polonium.

In the 2015 review paper ‘Petawatt Class Lasers Worldwide’ a comprehensive overview of the current status of high-power facilities of was presented. This was largely based on facility specifications, with some description of their uses, for instance in fundamental ultra-high-intensity interactions, secondary source generation, and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). With the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Professors Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou for the development of the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which made these lasers possible, we celebrate by providing a comprehensive update of the current status of ultra-high-power lasers and demonstrate how the technology has developed. We are now in the era of multi-petawatt facilities coming online, with 100 PW lasers being proposed and even under construction. In addition to this there is a pull towards development of industrial and multi-disciplinary applications, which demands much higher repetition rates, delivering high-average powers with higher efficiencies and the use of alternative wavelengths: mid-IR facilities. So apart from a comprehensive update of the current global status, we want to look at what technologies are to be deployed to get to these new regimes, and some of the critical issues facing their development.

We publish three Roadmaps on photonic, electronic and atomic collision physics in order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ICPEAC conference. Roadmap III focusses on heavy particles: with zero to relativistic speeds. Modern theoretical and experimental approaches provide detailed insight into the wide range of many-body interactions involving projectiles and targets of varying complexity ranging from simple atoms, through molecules and clusters, complex biomolecules and nanoparticles to surfaces and crystals. These developments have been driven by technological progress and future developments will expand the horizon of the systems that can be studied. This Roadmap aims at looking back along the road, explaining the evolution of the field, and looking forward, collecting nineteen contributions from leading scientists in the field.

Recent years have seen significant progress in the generation and application of twisted beams carrying orbital angular momentum. Here we study the elastic scattering of twisted Bessel light from a crystal and compare our predictions with the results for incident plane-wave radiation. Based on form-factor approximation our numerical calculations of the differential scattering cross sections have been carried out for a crystal of lithium at x-ray energies. It is shown that the use of twisted light can lead to a measurable change in the scattering cross section for the nanocrystals approaching a few nm in size.

We study x-ray photon scattering in the head-on collision of an XFEL pulse and a focused high-intensity laser pulse, described as paraxial Laguerre-Gaussian beam of arbitrary mode composition. For adequately chosen relative orientations of the polarization vectors of the colliding laser fields, this gives rise to a vacuum birefringence effect manifesting itself in polarization flipped signal photons. Throughout this article the XFEL is assumed to be mildly focused to a waist larger than that of the high-intensity laser beam. As previously demonstrated for the special case of a fundamental paraxial Gaussian beam, this scenario is generically accompanied by a scattering phenomenon of x-ray energy signal photons outside the forward cone of the XFEL beam, potentially assisting the detection of the effect in experiment. Here, we study the fate of the x-ray scattering signal under exemplary deformations of the transverse focus profile of the high-intensity pump.

Electronic structure computations of atoms and ions have a long tradition in physics with applications in basic research, spectroscopy, life sciences and technology. Various theoretical methods (and codes) have therefore been developed to account for the many-particle structure of atoms, from simple semi-empirical estimates to accurate predictions of selected data, and up to highly advanced time-independent and time-dependent numerical techniques. — Here, I present a fresh concept and implementation of (relativistic) atomic structure theory that supports the computation of interaction amplitudes, properties as well as a large number of excitation and decay processes for open-shell atoms and ions across the whole periodic table. This implementation will facilitate also studies on atomic cascades, responses as well as the time-evolution of atoms and ions. It is based on Julia, a new programming language for scientific computing, and provides an easy-to-use but powerful platform to extent atomic theory towards new applications.

We investigate phase matching for high-order harmonic generation with linearly polarized Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams with nonzero orbital angular momentum (OAM). We compare the conditions for efficient phase matching for LG beams with those of Gaussian beams. In particular, we show how the OAM of the incident beams affects the phase-matching conditions for the short and long trajectories that arise from the saddle-point approximation of the dipole moment. Thereby we illustrate that the coherence length for the short trajectories decreases for LG beams near the focus compared to Gaussian beams, whereas efficient phase matching can be achieved before and behind the focus. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the coherence length for the long trajectory behind the focus plane can be controlled by the OAM. This paper provides a route for the experiment in order to have good coherence control to enhance the conversion efficiency for high-order harmonic generation with beams carrying OAM.

We present a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study on superfluorescence in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength regime. Focusing a free-electron laser pulse in a cell filled with Xe gas, the medium is quasi-instantaneously population inverted by 4d-shell ionization on the giant resonance followed by Auger decay. On the timescale of ∼10 ps to ∼100 ps (depending on parameters) a macroscopic polarization builds up in the medium, resulting in superfluorescent emission of several Xe lines in the forward direction. As the number of emitters in the system is increased by either raising the pressure or the pump-pulse energy, the emission yield grows exponentially over four orders of magnitude and reaches saturation. With increasing yield, we observe line broadening, a manifestation of superfluorescence in the spectral domain. Our novel theoretical approach, based on a full quantum treatment of the atomic system and the irradiated field, shows quantitative agreement with the experiment and supports our interpretation.

A plasma channel undulator/wiggler may be created through the plasma wakefield excited by the beating of several Hermite-Gaussian laser modes propagating in a parabolic plasma channel. Control over both the betatron and undulator forces is conveniently achieved by tuning the amplitude ratios, colors, and order numbers of the modes. A special structure of the undulator/wiggler field without the focusing force near the propagation axis is generated inside the plasma wakefield by matching the strengths of the fundamental and first-order Hermite-Gaussian modes. The electron beam only experiences forced undulator oscillations in such a field, which significantly improves the quality of the emitted radiation. Since the value of the undulator strength parameter could be in a wide range, less or larger than unity, it is capable of generating narrow bandwidth x-ray, as well as the synchrotronlike high-energy x/γ-ray, radiation by harmonics. Additionally, controlling the relative phases between the laser modes allows for polarization control of the plasma undulator. High-order harmonics produced from a circularly polarized plasma undulator clearly show the vortex nature and carry well-defined orbital angular momentum.

Nonsequential two-photon ionization of inner-shell np subshell of neutral atoms by circularly polarized light is investigated. Detection of subsequent fluorescence as a signature of the process is proposed and the dependence of fluorescence degree of polarization on incident photon beam energy is studied. It is generally expected that the degree of polarization remains approximately constant, except when the beam energy is tuned to an intermediate n′ resonance. However, strong unexpected change in the polarization degree is discovered for nonsequential two-photon ionization at specific incident beam energy due to a zero contribution of the otherwise dominant ionization channel. Polarization degree of the fluorescence depends less on the beam parameters, and its measurements at this specific beam energy, whose position is very sensitive to the details of the employed theory, are highly desirable for evaluation of theoretical calculations of nonlinear ionization at hitherto unreachable accuracy.

We summarize the development of high harmonic generation (HHG) with linearly polarized Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beams and their superpositions to explain the non-perturbative aspects of HHG. Furthermore, we show that circularly polarized extreme ultraviolet vortices with well-defined orbital angular momentum (OAM) can be generated by HHG with bicircular LG beams. We introduce photon diagrams in order to explain how to calculate the OAM and the polarization of the generated harmonics by means of simultaneous conservation of spin angular momentum and OAM. Moreover, we show how the intensity ratio of the driving fields in HHG with bicircular LG beams further enhances the generation of circularly polarized twisted attosecond pulse trains.

A high-order implicit multidimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) method is developed for simulating plasmas at solid densities. The space-time arrangement is based on Yee and a leapfrog algorithm for electromagnetic fields and particle advancement. The field solver algorithm completely eliminates numerical instabilities found in explicit PIC methods with relaxed time step and grid resolution. Moreover, this algorithm eliminates the numerical cooling found in the standard implicit PIC methods by using a pseudo-electric-field method. The particle pusher algorithm combines the standard Boris particle pusher with the Newton-Krylov iteration method. This algorithm increases the precision accuracy by several orders of magnitude when compared with the standard Boris particle pusher and also significantly decreases the iteration time when compared with the pure Newton-Krylov method. The code is tested with several benchmarks, including Weibel instability, and relativistic laser plasma interactions at both low and solid densities.

We present experiments investigating dense carbon at pressures between 100 GPa and 200 GPa and temperatures between 5,000 K and 15,000 K. High-pressure samples with different temperatures were created by laser-driven shock compression of graphite and varying the initial density from 1.53 g/cm³ to 2.21 g/cm³ and the drive laser intensity from 7.1 TW/cm² to 14.2 TW/cm². In order to deduce temperatures, spectrally resolved X-ray scattering was applied to determine ion-ion structure factors at a scattering vector of k = 4.12x10¹⁰ m⁻¹ which shows high sensitivity to temperature for the investigated sample conditions. After comparison to corresponding DFT-MD simulations, we were able to assign each structure factor a temperature. This information is indicative of the expected temperature range for the melting line of carbon at high pressures and can be compared to theoretical predictions.

Great progress has been made in recent years in realizing compact, laser-based neutron generators. These devices, however, were inapplicable for conducting neutron absorption spectroscopy because of the electromagnetic noise produced by the interaction of a strong laser field with matter. To overcome this limitation, we developed a novel neutron time-of-flight detector, largely immune to electromagnetic noise. The detector is based on a plastic scintillator, only a few-millimeters in size, coupled with a silicon photo-multiplier by a long light-guiding fiber. Using this detector, we demonstrated for the first time laser-based fast neutron spectroscopy. This achievement paves the way to realizing compact neutron radiography systems for research, security, and commercial applications, and introduces new prospects for probing the temperature of matter under extreme conditions and for inertial confinement fusion diagnostics.

Thermal profile modification of an active material in a laser amplifier via optical pumping results in a change in the material’s refractive index, and causes thermal expansion and stress, eventually leading to spatial phase aberrations, or even permanent material damage. For this purpose, knowledge of the 3D spatio-temporal thermal profile, which can currently only be retrieved via numerical simulations, is critical for joule-class laser amplifiers to reveal potentially dangerous thermal features within the pumped active materials. In this investigation, a detailed, spatio-temporal numerical simulation was constructed and tested for accuracy against surface thermal measurements of various end-pumped Yb³⁺-doped laser-active materials. The measurements and simulations show an excellent agreement and the model was successfully applied to a joule-class Yb³⁺-based amplifier currently operating in the POLARIS laser system at the Friedrich-Schiller-University and Helmholtz-Institute Jena in Germany.

A particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation code is used to investigate the transport and energy deposition of an intense proton beam in solid-state material. This code is able to simulate close particle interactions by using a Monte Carlo binary collision model. Such a model takes into account all related interactions between the incident protons and material particles, e.g., proton-nucleus, proton–bound-electron, and proton–free-electron collisions. This code also includes a Monte Carlo model for the collisional ionization and electron-ion recombination as well as the depression of the ionization potential by shielding of surrounding particles. Moreover, for intense proton beams, in order to include collective electromagnetic effects, significantly speed up the simulation, and simultaneously avoid numerical instabilities, an approach that combines the PIC method with a reduced model of high-density plasma based on Ohm's law is used. Simulation results indicate that the collective electromagnetic effects have a significant influence on the transport and energy deposition of proton beams. The Ohmic electric field would increase the stopping power and leads to a shortened range of proton beams in solid. The magnetic field would localize the energy deposition by collimating proton beams, which would otherwise be deflected by the collisions with nuclei.

We describe the results of analytical calculations and numerical simulations of the confinement properties of a mechanically compensated cylindrical Penning trap which has conical endcap openings for large-solid-angle access for example with highly focused laser beams. While the analytical calculations show that under the common geometrical conditions the harmonicity of the confining fields near the centre of the trap does not change when a conical shape of the endcap electrodes is introduced, numerical simulations show significant changes when the opening angle of the cone exceeds a certain critical angle. We also show that these sharp features are due to the fringe-field effects above the critical angle, which are not described by the analytical calculations. These effects are also observed in a cylindrical Penning trap when the length of the endcap electrodes is reduced below a certain critical value.

calculations of QED radiative corrections to the 2P1/2 - 2P3/2 fine-structure transition energy are performed for selected F-like ions. These calculations are nonperturbative in αZ and include all first-order and many-electron second-order effects in α. When compared to approximate QED computations, a notable discrepancy is found especially for F-like uranium for which the predicted self-energy contributions even differ in sign. Moreover, all deviations between theory and experiment for the 2P1/2 - 2P3/2 fine-structure energies of F-like ions, reported recently by Li et al., Phys. Rev. A 98, 020502(R) (2018), are resolved if their highly accurate, non-QED fine-structure values are combined with the QED corrections ab initially evaluated here.

Damage formation is investigated in GaAs implanted with 1 MeV Si ions to ion fluences from 3 x 10(12) to 5 x 10(15) cm(-2) at room temperature. Under the conditions applied, amorphization of the implanted layers does not occur. The weakly damaged layers are studied by applying different experimental techniques including Rutherford backscattering spectrometry in channeling configuration, x-ray diffraction, in situ curvature measurement, optical subgap spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. The results are evaluated and quantitatively connected with each other. Damage formation is described as a function of the ion fluence using a common defect evolution model. Point defects and defect clusters have to be taken into account in the ion fluence range of main interest up to 2 x 10(15) cm(-2). Point defects contribute by a factor of about 8 more to both perpendicular strain and in-plane stress than defect clusters. When the concentration of point defects or the induced strain reaches a critical value, defect clusters form, which ensures that no further increase of perpendicular strain occurs. This reveals a clear driving force for cluster formation. The microstructure of the defect clusters cannot be determined from the results. As3Ga2 interstitial clusters are supposed. A remarkable decrease of the shear modulus of the implanted layers below the value of pristine GaAs by approximate to -35% is observed. Surprisingly, the change of shear modulus already sets in at a very low damage level of a few percent.

We consider ionization of atomic hydrogen by antiproton impact. Doubly differential cross sections for ionization calculated within a recently developed semiclassical approach by Bondarev et al. (Phys. Rev. A 95, 052709, 2017) are presented. Comparison of the obtained results with other theoretical predictions is given.

We report the formation of electromagnetic solitons in over-dense plasmas in the relativistic transparency regime. By using one-dimensional and two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, the formation and basic properties of these long-lived relativistic electromagnetic solitons are studied. The predicted mechanism of soliton formation is different from the existing investigations. The latter ones are found to exist in the wake of the high-intensity laser pulse during the interaction with a low density plasma, and such solitons are made of low-frequency, spatially localized electromagnetic fields. While for the former ones, frequency of solitons formed in the relativistic transparency regime is comparable to incident laser frequency. Moreover, a threshold of plasma density under which stable solitons can be formed is analyzed. These newly predicted solitons are expected to be observed in the present-day laser-plasma experiments.

We have measured the ground-state g factor of boronlike argon 40Ar13+ with a fractional uncertainty of 1.4×10−9 with a single ion in the newly developed Alphatrap double Penning-trap setup. The value of g=0.663 648 455 32(93) obtained here is in agreement with our theoretical prediction of 0.663 648 12(58). The latter is obtained accounting for quantum electrodynamics, electron correlation, and nuclear effects within the state-of-the-art theoretical methods. Our experimental result distinguishes between existing predictions that are in disagreement, and lays the foundations for an independent determination of the fine-structure constant.

We discuss the possibility of creating novel research tools by producing and storing highly relativistic beams of highly ionised atoms in the CERN accelerator complex, and by exciting their atomic degrees of freedom with lasers to produce high-energy photon beams. Intensity of such photon beams would be by several orders of magnitude higher than offered by the presently operating light sources, in the particularly interesting gamma-ray energy domain of 0.1-400 MeV. In this energy range, the high-intensity photon beams can be used to produce secondary beams of polarised electrons, polarised positrons, polarised muons, neutrinos, neutrons and radioactive ions. New research opportunities in a wide domain of fundamental and applied physics can be opened by the Gamma Factory scientific programme based on the above primary and secondary beams.