Abstract
A general method for fabricating transient plasma structures with high-intensity laser pulses is developed to gain fine control over laser-plasma interactions. These structures have been used as programmable photonic devices in the development of laser-wakefield accelerators, soft X-ray lasers and plasma nonlinear optics driven by multi-terawatt laser pulses. Plasma ramps are used to control electron injection in laser-wakefield accelerators, plasma waveguides are used to enhance the efficiency of soft X-ray lasers by orders of magnitude and periodic plasma structures are used to achieve quasi-phase matching in relativistic harmonic generation. By scanning the interaction length with the same plasma-fabrication method, tomographic measurements are carried out to resolve the injection/acceleration process in laser-wakefield accelerators and amplification processes in X-ray lasers and relativistic harmonic generation. A theoretical analysis and a computer simulation are also carried out to provide insightful pictures of these processes. These research works show that by controlling plasma structures with optical fabrication methods, laser-plasma interaction can be engineered to expand and enrich the frontier of high-field physics.