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Updated: May 27, 2026

Investigation of Early Plasma Evolution Induced by Ultrashort Laser Pulses
Published on: July 2, 2012
The influence of plasma defocusing in high harmonic generation
Chien-Jen Lai1, Franz X Kärtner
1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We numerically investigate the influence of plasma defocusing in high harmonic generation (HHG) by solving the first-order wave equation in an ionized medium and defining an enhancement factor to quantitatively analyze the influence of plasma defocusing. While degrading the driver pulse intensity, plasma also has a strong impact on HHG phase-matching. Combined with the HHG wavelength scaling law, our results give an estimate of HHG efficiencies with different driver wavelengths and show a limited HHG efficiency in high density media.

