3 December 2018
Frascati
Europe/Rome timezone

Topics and Scope

The meeting is intended to be an informal occasion to discuss about strong electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) generated by laser-matter interactions at high laser energy and intensity, and on related phenomena such as extreme laser-induced currents and ultra-strong quasi-static magnetic and electric fields.

It is well-known that the interaction of high-intensity lasers with matter generates intense radiofrequency-microwave radiation with time duration up to hundreds of nanoseconds. These fields have been observed for femtosecond to nanosecond laser pulses, have bandwidths of several gigahertz and are localized both inside and outside the experimental vacuum chamber. They scale with the laser energy and intensity and have been observed up to the MV/m order. They are well known to cause saturation and even damage to the electronic equipment placed both inside and outside the experimental chamber, and thus represent a very serious issue for all electronic diagnostics used in laser-matter interaction.

High-energy and high-intensity lasers are today applied to studies on nuclear physics, particle acceleration and warm dense matter, as important examples. In Europe this field of research is pursued on several large facilities and this has led to the development of new laser systems just completed or under construction, such as LMJ/PETAL and Apollon (France), ELI (Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania), VEGA (Spain).

For this reason EMPs are today a hot topic of research. It is important and urgent to collect and to compare experimental data on EMPs from several laser facilities, to define methodolgies for their accurate measurements, to develop theoretical models and numerical codes allowing to reproduce the existing data and to extrapolate them to laser-pulse energies and intensities beyond what is currently available, to develop approaches and tools to mitigate both the generation and the impact of EMPs on electronic equipment.

This activity of research on these very intense fields is very useful also for the generation of extreme laser-induced transient currents and of ultra-strong quasi-static fields and on the related applications.