THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND SPECIFICITY OF MATHEMATICAL MODELLING
Particle-in-cell modeling of intense terahertz emission from gaseous targets ionized by a two-color circularly polarized laser pulse
In this work we study numerically the generation of intense terahertz radiation in the interaction of two-color circularly polarized laser pulses of optical or infrared wavelength range with argon. The terahertz pulses obtained in such a scheme can be used to generate strong slowly changing electric and magnetic fields of a given configuration. To investigate the terahertz emission by a plasma source arising from the ionization of a gas medium by femtosecond laser field with a peak intensity of 10¹⁴-10¹⁵ W/cm² a fully kinetic plasma model consisting of the Vlasov equations for the plasma distribution function and the Maxwell equations for the self-consistent electromagnetic field has been used. Our numerical code is based on the particle-in-cell method and employs state-of-the-art widely used algorithms, such as finite difference time domain method for modeling the electromagnetic fields, Boris pusher to update the particle positions and velocities, and the charge conservation scheme to satisfy the continuity equation. The field ionization is implemented using the tunneling ionization rate formula. Our simulations have shown that at a sufficiently small interaction volume the plasma oscillations excited by asymmetric ionization are almost homogeneous in space and lead to an efficient conversion of electron energy into the energy of emitted terahertz radiation.