Welcome to the University of Maryland’s Intense Laser Matter Interactions group webpage. The interaction of extremely intense laser pulses with solids, liquids and gases has many technological applications and is rich in physics. Our...
About WordPress Get Involved WordPress.org Documentation Learn WordPress Support Feedback Log In Home Research Highlights Spatio-temporal optical vortices (STOVs) Filament waveguides from thin air Wakefield acceleration in high density plasma Microstructured plasma waveguides for direct laser...
Our lab studies the basic physics and applications of the interaction of extremely intense laser light with matter. At the links below you will find highlights from some of our research projects. There are also links to recent papers on each page, as well as a chronological list of selected...
Measuring nonlinear optics in the strong field regime Spectrally interfering broadband, coherent white light pulses in a pump probe experiment enables single shot measurements of refractive index transients on a few femtosecond time scale. Ultrafast laser pulses can strongly perturb any material...
Corrugated plasma channels enable electron acceleration that scales directly with laser field strength, making relativistic electron bunch generation possible with smaller, high repetition rate laser systems. Applications of the interaction of intense laser pulses with matter, which include...
Heated air expanding in the wake of an array of laser filaments can guide light signals in a long-lived atmospheric “optical fiber.” Femtosecond filaments arise from interplay between nonlinear self-focusing of ultrashort pulse laser beams...
Using a high density gas jet enables relativistic acceleration of electrons in plasma wakefields with lower laser powers, leading the way to truly portable laser accelerators. Accelerators are one of the basic tools of modern science, accelerating particles near the speed of light to probe...
The following animations were produced from a set of EPOCH1 3D simulations in support of a poster given by current group member John Felice for the LaserNetUS 2026 Annual Users’ Meeting. Renders were produced using PyVista2 to visualize...
We have discovered the formation of “smoke ring” -like vortices that travel along with the laser pulse and control its global energy flow, a universal phenomenon underlying strong field laser propagation. Top, a Laguerre Gaussian mode has...
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