Double resonant plasma wakefields

Present work in Laser Plasma Accelerators focuses on a single laser pulse driving a non-linear wake in a plasma. Such single pulse regimes require ever increasing laser power in order to excite ever increasing wake amplitudes. Such high intensity pulses can be limited by instabilities as well engineering restrictions and experimental constraints on optics. Alternatively we present a look at resonantly driving plasmas using a laser pulse train. In particular we compare analytic, numerical and VORPAL simulation results to characterize a proposed experiment to measure the wake resonantly driven by four Gaussian laser pulses. The current progress depicts the interaction of 4 CO2 laser pulses, λlaser = 10.6μm, of 3 ps full width at half maximum (FWHM) length separated peak-to-peak by 18 ps, each of normalized vector potential a0 0.7. Results confirm previous discourse and show, for a given laser profile, an accelerating field on the order of 900 MV/m, for a plasma satisfying the resonant condition ωp = π tFWHM.