Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 358
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2014-50556-9

Regular Article

A spatiotemporal study of the relativistic nonlinear effects on laser absorption by a finite-size magneto plasma

Department of Physics and Institute for Plasma Research, Kharazmi University, 49 Dr Mofatteh Avenue, 15614 Tehran, Iran

^a e-mail: mehdian@khu.ac.ir

Received: 26 July 2014
Received in final form: 19 September 2014
Published online: 1 December 2014

Abstract

In this paper, the relativistic electromagnetic 1.5 dimensional particle-in-cell code has been employed to investigate the temporal behavior of nonlinear absorption of a short intense laser pulse in finite-size magnetized sub-critical (i.e. under the critical density) plasma. This work has been done by relying on a detailed temporal study of the phase-mixing and scattering processes occurring in the finite-size system of laser-plasma interaction. Part of the results obtained in this manuscript confirm recent important theoretical findings, including the wave-breaking or phase-mixing phenomena of relativistic upper-hybrid (UH) oscillations in magnetized plasma [C. Maity, A. Sarka, P.K. Shukla, N. Chakrabarti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 215002 (2013)]. Moreover, we found the explicit reasons for the anomalous behavior of the absorption rate in magnetized plasma by scrutinising the phase-mixing time and scattering process in finite-size magnetized plasma for different values of laser and plasma parameters.