Particle acceleration by ultraintense laser interactions with beams and plasmas

Recently, there has been great interest growing in ultrahigh field particle acceleration driven by ultraintense laser interactions with beams and plasmas. Although numerous concepts of particle acceleration by laser fields have been proposed almost since the beginning of the laser evolution, there has been tremendous progress in recent years on their theoretical and experimental aspects owing to advances in the generation of ultraintense short laser pulses. The laser–plasma accelerator concepts are reviewed on the laser wakefield acceleration mechanism. In particular, the electron acceleration by the laser wakefield in plasmas is illustrated by our recent experimental results, including the propagation of the ultrashort intense laser pulses in plasmas.