Beam shaping and applications

In this book, we shall concentrate on Bessel beams in the pulsed laser regime. Bessel beams, featured by a central peak (Bessel core) surrounded by rings, are a particularly interesting class of light beams, which can be generated by conical lenses (axicons) or holograms. Thanks to their ¿nondiffracting¿ properties they have been used in various research areas. The main objective of the book was the optimization of the pulsed Bessel beam for two distinguished applications; one for electron acceleration and the second one for the microstructuring of transparent materials. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part we have exploited in a numerical work the accelerating nature of suitably tailored Bessel beams, for the gain enhancement of particles in standard laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators, where the energy gain is limited by phase dephasing of the particle with respect to the plasma wave. In the second part we have reported the microstructuring of different transparent materials, especially in the diamond with an ultrashort pulsed Bessel beam for different potential applications, such as microfluidics, biosensing is also investigated.