2004 Volume 73 Issue 2 Pages 186
Today, the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in conjunction with advanced solid‐state laser technologies has opened up new avenues for the production of 10‐fs‐range, petawatt peak power pulses. Such laser pulses can produce super‐strong fields which correspond to 60 times the field binding the ground state electron in the hydrogen atom, and inner shell electrons of heavy atoms do not remain within the atomic center. At such intensities, the electron velocity in the laser field also becomes relativistic. Thus, the free electrons move at close to the speed of light and their mass changes dramatically compared to their rest mass. In this article, the laser technology used to produce such super‐strong fields and examples of new phenomena resulting from the application of these systems to atomic and plasma physics are reviewed.
