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The generation of high-current (>kA), relativistic electron beams from the wave breaking of plasma waves generated by a highly nonlinear interaction between Raman scattering, self-heating, and self-focusing of high-power (>5TW), short-pulse (<1ps) lasers is examined in detail using a fully explicit particle-in-cell model. The resulting beams have a continuous energy spread with a maximum energy exceeding simple dephasing estimates. For a 5 J laser, a total of 210^11 electrons are accelerated, but 210^8 electrons are at 501MeV with a normalized emittance of 13.
Tzeng et al. (1997) studied this question.