Guiding of Laguerre–Gaussian pulses in high-order plasma channels

In laser wakefield accelerators, guiding of drive laser pulses in preformed plasma channels plays a key role to overcome laser diffraction for effective acceleration. Different from guiding schemes studied previously, where a Gaussian laser pulse and a parabolic plasma channel were investigated, here we investigate the guiding of Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) pulses in plasma channels. Analytical studies and three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that the matched conditions still exist for high order laser pulses and high order plasma channels. For usual Gaussian and high order LG pulses, the second order parabolic channel gives the best guiding. Although the laser pulse can also be guided in even higher order channels, its envelope deforms during propagation. For laser pulses with combined multi-LG modes, determined by their azimuthal orbit angular momenta, there is axisymmetric or non-axisymmetric evolution for the transverse laser intensity profile. The preformed plasma channel can guide the combined pulses but the transverse intensity profile of the laser pulses always evolves.