Extremely Nonsinusoidal Emissions and Fast Electron Phenomena from Strong Laser Pulses Obliquely P-Incident on Sharp-Edged Plasmas

High laser harmonic light [1] emerges when the Vulcan petawatt laser's sub-ps laser pulses are obliquely incident on slab targets with extremely low pre-pulse energy. Similar work is in progress with the ALLS 200 TW Ti-Saph laser at INRS EMT. (Pulses are 24 fs at 10 Hz with 10$^{-10}$ contrast, even without plasma mirrors). 2-D PIC (OSIRIS code at INRS) results on basic mechanism(s) resemble those of Gibbon [2], Naumova et al. [3] and Thaury et al. [4]. The very large and asymmetric electromagnetic ``spikes'' which account for the high harmonic content are produced by extremely concentrated 2D plasma surface currents. The connection between our 2D PIC results (also those in [3] and 1D PIC results [2,4] using the Gibbon-Bourdier moving 1D formalism[2] is also discussed, as are the fast electrons, including some related quasi-steady magnetic fields. [1] B. Dromey et al Nature Phys. Lett., 2, 456-459 (2006) [2] Paul Gibbon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 50 (1996) [3] N. Naumova, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 195003 (2004). [4] C. Thaury, et al., Nature Phys. 3, 424 (2007)