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TY - UNPB AU - Cantono, G. AU - Ceccotti, T. AU - Fedeli, L. AU - Macchi, A. ED - Yamazaki, Yoshishige ED - Raubenheimer, Tor ED - McCausey, Amy ED - Schaa, Volker RW TI - 2019 APS DPB Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award - Relativistic Plasmonics in High Intensity Laser-Solid Interactions J2 - Proc. of NAPAC2019, Lansing, MI, USA, 01-06 September 2019 CY - Lansing, MI, USA T2 - North American Particle Accelerator Conference T3 - 4 LA - english AB - I will present the results of my PhD project, centred on the experimental study of the radiation sources raised by the excitation of propagating Surface Plasmons (SPs) on solid targets irradiated by highly intense, short laser pulses. This work, originally aiming at the investigation of how to enhance the laser-target coupling with micro-structured periodic targets, encourages both the development of a suitable theory for SPs in such a non-linear regime, and the possibility to exchange ideas and applications between classical plasmonics and the domain of relativistic laser-plasma acceleration*. Our experiments show that the SP excitation is correlated to the acceleration of dense electron bunches of few MeV of energies along the surface of the laser-irradiated target**, and to the emission in the same direction of high order harmonics of the laser frequency***. Both emissions can be optimized by an appropriate tuning of the laser-target parameters (incidence angle, target profile and density). In addition, 2D Particle-In-Cell simulations reveal a spatio-temporal correlation between accelerated electrons and harmonics that gives insight on the generation mechanism of the XUV beam. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland ER -