A simple script to calculate basic parameters for relativistic laser plasma interactions.

When describing a laser, LPA people often define it by energy on target, or output power, with FWHM durations and beam size (can mean radius, waist, diameter etc). CheatSheet is a tiny library, which allows to define laser with different inputs and provides convertions between them. In the following example same laser is defined with the help of different parameters:

from LPICS.ics import CheatSheet as cs

lpi = cs(Energy=1.2, R_fwhm=16, tau_fwhm=27)
print(f"Power is {lpi.prm['Power']*1e-12:0.4g} TW" )
print(f"Duration field sqrt(2)*RMS is {lpi.prm['tau']:0.4g} fs" )

lpi = cs(Power=41.75e12, R_fwhm=16, tau=22.93)
print(f"\nField amplitude (normalized) is {lpi.prm['a0']:0.4g}" )
print(f"Beam waist is {lpi.prm['w0']:0.4g} um" )

lpi = cs(a0=2.595, w0=13.59, tau=22.93)
print(f"\nLaser energy is {lpi.prm['Energy']:0.4g} J")

Power is 41.75 TW
Duration field sqrt(2)*RMS is 22.93 fs

Field amplitude (normalized) is 2.595
Beam waist is 13.59 um

Laser energy is 1.2 J

The lpi.prm dictionary containes the necessary conversions, and can be used directly, e.g. cs(Power=1e15, R_fwhm=50).prm['a0'], cs(lam0=0.8).prm['n_c']. Besides conversions, for a given laser there are useful methods to calculate some matching plasma densities:

• lpi.match_density('WLu')
• lpi.match_density('longitudinal')
• lpi.match_density('critPower')

or to estimate the maximum ionization level produced by the laser:

• lpi.element_Zmax(name=element_name, e.g. 'Ar')

You can use the script online via Binder

Can be installed by cloning the source

git clone https://github.com/hightower8083/LaserPlasmaICS.git
cd CheatSheet
pip install .

or via PiPy

pip install git+https://github.com/hightower8083/LaserPlasmaICS.git

Feel free to propose your favorite formulas or fixes