Visualisations of selected simulations.

• Novel, highly efficient regime of the laser wakefield acceleration where more than half of the laser energy can be converted into energetic electrons.

• Description: A 250 TW, 6 fs laser pulse (represented by the red and blue isosurfaces) propagates through a gaseous target and drives a highly nonlinear plasma wave (shades of brown). Within this wake, a dense nanocoulomb electron bunch is accelerated to energies exceeding  200 MeV (shown in rainbow colours).
• Related publication: Horný, V. et al. (2024). Efficient laser wakefield accelerator in pump depletion dominated bubble regime, Physical Review E, 110, 035202. Open access.

• Massive 3D particle-in-cell simulation of proton acceleration from double layer target

• Description: 3D particle-in-cell simulation of proton acceleration driven by a  4.6 PW laser pulse (visualised by the red and blue isosurfaces) interacting with a double-layer target consisting of a near-critical-density plasma (shades of purple) followed by a solid plastic layer (shades of pink). In this configuration, the protons are expected to be accelerated to energies exceeding  500 MeV.
• Related publication: Horný, V. & Doria, D. (2025). Multi-PW laser–driven proton acceleration using a plasma-lens target, Scientific Reports, XXX, YYYYYY. Open access.

• Interaction of intense laser pulse with a nanoball

• Description: A laser pulse with an intensity of 10²⁰ W/cm² (indicated by the coloured arrows) interacts with a hydrogen plasma sphere of radius 50 nm, whose position is marked by the red circle. The electron density distribution (shown in shades of grey) exhibits transverse oscillations associated with the local field-enhancement effect, leading to the emission of attosecond electron bunches.
• Related publication: Horný, V. & Veisz, L. (2021). Generation of single attosecond relativistic electron bunch from intense laser interaction with a nanosphere. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 63, 125025. Open access.

• Attosecond betatron radiation pulse train

• Description: During laser wakefield acceleration, relativistic electrons experience transverse oscillations within the plasma cavity, generating betatron radiation. In the configuration considered here, these oscillations are further driven by an externally applied modulating pulse that imposes a controlled temporal variation on the electron trajectories. This additional forcing transfers a corresponding temporal structure to the emitted x-rays. The resulting emission is therefore not continuous but organized into a sequence of well-defined attosecond bursts, forming a train of attosecond pulses.
• Related publication: Horný, V., Krůs, M., Yan, W. & Fülöp, T. (2020). Attosecond betatron radiation pulse train. Scientific Reports 10, 15074. Open access.

• Optical injection into laser wakefield accelerator

• Description: This simulation supports an experiment on optical injection into multiple buckets of a mildly nonlinear plasma wave (shades of gray) conducted at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Extreme Light Laboratory using the Diocles laser system. The colored points represent the electron macroparticles that ultimately become trapped and accelerated within the first five periods of the plasma wave.
• Related publication: Golovin, G. et al. (2020). Generation of ultrafast electron bunch trains via trapping into multiple periods of plasma wakefields. Physics of Plasmas, 27(3), 033105. Accepted manuscript version availible at ArXiv.org, 2003.02798.

• Electron motion equation in combined field of two laser pulses

• Description: The motion equation for a single electron initially at rest, placed at various starting positions, is solved in the combined fields of two laser pulses with intensities of 3.4×10¹⁹ W/cm² (incoming from the left) and 3.4×10¹⁷ W/cm² (incoming from below). The visualisation demonstrates that a substantial fraction of these electrons is ejected in the direction between the two incident pulses, highlighting a mechanism directly relevant for optical injection.
• Related publication: Horný, V., Petržílka, V., Klimo, O. & Krůs, M. (2017). Short electron bunches generated by perpendicularly crossing laser pulses. Physics of Plasmas, 24(10), 103125.