Chirped Pulse Compression in Plasma

CPA technique has made available multi-petawatt laser pulses. However, millions times stronger lasers are required to experimentally verify the prediction of modern theoretical physics, e.g. pair-production or radiation reaction. As it is obvious that the conventional CPA cannot be directly scaled-up due to the compression gratings, fundamentally different approach should be taken. While diverse novel ideas are investigated for this goal, such as Raman backward amplification, Brillouin scatter, or plasma gratings, here we present a new idea that is completely different from previous ones. In our new system, we exploit the plasma-intrinsic, density-dependent refractive index. From PIC simulations, we obtained almost 100% compression of an 2.5-ps incident pulse into 10 fs. Theoretical estimation of various instabilities shows that they can be suppressed well not to affect the compression process deletoriously. We discuss the potential of our new idea as a next generation post-CPA.