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Nonlinear Evolution Of The Plasma Beat Wave: Compressing The Laser Beat Notes Via Electromagnetic Cascading, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Gennady Shvets

Serge Youri Kalmykov

The near-resonant beat wave excitation of an electron plasma wave (EPW) can be employed for generating the trains of few-femtosecond electromagnetic (EM) pulses in rarefied plasmas. The EPW produces a comoving index grating that induces a laser phase modulation at the difference frequency. As a result, the cascade of sidebands red and blue shifted by integer multiples of the beat frequency is generated in the laser spectrum. The bandwidth of the phase-modulated laser is proportional to the product of the plasma length, laser wavelength, and amplitude of the electron density perturbation. When the beat frequency is lower than the electron …