High field terahertz emission from relativistic laser-driven plasma wakefields

Abstract

We propose a method to generate high field terahertz (THz) radiation with peak strength of GV/cm level in the THz frequency gap range 1-10 THz using a relativistic laser interaction with a gaseous plasma target. Due to the effect of local pump depletion, an initially Gaussian laser pulse undergoes leading edge erosion and eventually evolves to a state with leading edge being step function. Interacting with such a pulse, electrons gain transverse residual momentum and excite net transverse currents modulated by the relativistic plasma frequency. These currents give rise to the low frequency THz emission. We demonstrate this process with one and two dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.