Extremely Nonsinusoidal Emissions from Strong Laser Pulses Obliquely P-Incident on Sharp-Edged Plasmas

Extremely high laser harmonics emissions [1] emerge from the Vulcan petawatt laser's sub-picosecond laser pulses obliquely incident on slab targets with extremely low pre-pulse energy. Similar studies are to be made using the ALLS 200 TW Ti-Saph laser (24 fs at 10 Hz with 10$^{-10}$ contrast even without plasma mirrors). We discuss our 2-D PIC simulations using the OSIRIS code with a view to (a) understanding the basic mechanism(s) for the production of the harmonics and (b) establishing the effect of density gradients. Typical results resemble those of Naumova et al. [2], including the presence of a very large and asymmetric electromagnetic ``spikes'' which account for the high harmonic content. \newline [1] B. Dromey, M. Zepf, A. Gopal, K. Lancaster, M. S. Wei, K. Krushelnick, M. Tatarakis, N. Vakakis, S. Moustaizis, R. Kodama, M. Tampo, C. Stoeckl, R. Clarke, H. Habara, D. Neely, S. Karsch and P. Norreys, Nature Phys. Lett., 2, 456-459 (2006) \newline [2] N. Naumova, I. Sokolov, J. Nees,1 A. Maksimchuk, V. Yanovsky, and G. Mourou Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 195003 (2004)