High-intensity few-cycle laser-pulse generation by the plasma-wakefield self-compression effect

We present experimental results for laser pulse compression due to wakefield excitation in the relativistic regime using the spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction technique for complete pulse characterization. The results indicate that the pulse was compressed to a 10-fs duration which was verified by fully relativistic three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Optimized modeling based on a hydrodynamic code was also done, showing the possibility of producing laser pulses of few-cycle duration.