Self-guiding of laser pulses and spatio-temporal optical vortices in plasma

Relativistic self-focusing and self-guiding are processes fundamental to laser-plasma particle acceleration. Recent work in optical filamentation has discovered the existence of spatio-temporal optical vortices (STOVs) [1] and has shown their integral connection to all self-focusing collapse and self-guiding scenarios. Here we show that STOVs are an essential feature of LWFA through their generation by relativistic self-focusing. Three dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations show the formation of STOVs in the pulse, corresponding to vortical flow of the Poynting vector, which then influences subsequent pulse propagation such as the self-healing of the relativistic self-guiding process. \newline \newline [1] N. Jhajj \textit{et al. arXiv:1604.01751[physics.optics]}