title: Mitigating the relativistic laser beam filamentation via an elliptical beam profile.
abstract: It is shown that the filamentation instability of relativistically intense laser pulses in plasmas can be mitigated in the case where the laser beam has an elliptically distributed beam profile. A high-power elliptical Gaussian laser beam would break up into a regular filamentation pattern-in contrast to the randomly distributed filaments of a circularly distributed laser beam-and much more laser power would be concentrated in the central region. A highly elliptically distributed laser beam experiences anisotropic self-focusing and diffraction processes in the plasma channel ensuring that the unstable diffractive rings of the circular case cannot be produced. The azimuthal modulational instability is thereby suppressed. These findings are verified by three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.
authors.affiliation: HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology and School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.|Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: T W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology and School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.|Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, People's Republic of China.|Science College, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: C T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: A P L
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Robinson
authors.affiliation: HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology and School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Qiao
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: S Z
authors.initials: SZ
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Science College, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: H B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Zhuo
authors.affiliation: Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom.|Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Norreys
authors.affiliation: HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology and School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.|Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: X T
authors.initials: XT
authors.lastname: He