Plasma Research Laboratory

Research Area

Two omnipresent ingredients in the universe are plasmas and charged dust. The interplay between these two has opened up a new and fascinating research area, that is of dusty plasma, which are ubiquitous in different parts of our solar system, namely planetary rings, circumsolar dust rings, the interplanetary medium, cometary tails, as well as interstellar molecular clouds etc. Dusty plasmas also occur in microelectronic processing devices, in low-temperature laboratory discharges, and in tokamaks.

The interaction of high power laser with plasma gives rise to bundle of exotic phenomena. Due to rapid progress in ultra high intensity lasers over last decades, based on the invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) and advanced femtosecond techniques, it has become possible to drive electrons with relativistic energy opening new areas of relativistic nonlinear optics and plasma physics. The understanding of relativistic laser-plasma interaction is basic to many applications, including optical field ionized x-ray lasers, plasma based electron accelerator schemes. Improvement of laser duration to 10 fs from tens of picoseconds has made it possible to study phenomena which were otherwise too fast to be observed by old lasers.