Electron acceleration by intense shock-like laser pulses in vacuum

With both analytical and numerical simulation methods, it is found that, by using an intense laser pulse with sharply rising or falling edges in vacuum, an electron can be accelerated to very high energies, which approaches the upper-limit of the energy predicted by the half-wavelength acceleration mechanism. Because the form factor of the laser pulse is like the shape of a shock wave, we call this kind of acceleration mechanism as shock-pulse-laser acceleration. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.