Reflecting petawatt lasers off relativistic plasma mirrors: a realistic path to the Schwinger limit

Optical properties of relativistic plasma mirrors

The advent of ultrahigh-power femtosecond lasers creates a need for an entirely new class of optical components based on plasmas. The most promising of these are known as plasma mirrors, formed when an intense femtosecond laser ionizes a solid surface. These mirrors specularly reflect the main part of a laser pulse and can be used as active optical elements to manipulate its temporal and spatia...

Real Mirrors Reflecting Virtual Worlds

This paper introduces the idea of using real mirrors in combination with rear-projection systems for the purpose of interacting with and navigating through the displayed information. Subsequently a derived application is described. For this, we use a hand-held planar mirror and address two fundamental problems of applying head tracking with rear-projection planes: the limited viewing volume of ...

A new reflecting microscope objective with two concentric spherical mirrors.

Dense blocks of energetic ions driven by multi-petawatt lasers

Laser-driven ion accelerators have the advantages of compact size, high density, and short bunch duration over conventional accelerators. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to simultaneously enhance the yield and quality of laser-driven ion beams for practical applications. Here we propose a scheme to address this challenge via the use of emerging multi-petawatt lasers and a density-modulate...

Off-Path TCP Exploits: Global Rate Limit Considered Dangerous

In this paper, we report a subtle yet serious side channel vulnerability (CVE-2016-5696) introduced in a recent TCP specification. The specification is faithfully implemented in Linux kernel version 3.6 (from 2012) and beyond, and affects a wide range of devices and hosts. In a nutshell, the vulnerability allows a blind off-path attacker to infer if any two arbitrary hosts on the Internet are c...