Reviews of Plasma Physics 22

This new release of Reviews of Plasma Physics is somewhat different from the previous volumes, as it actually contains two reviews. The first one, due to the late B B Kadomtsev, is a general presentation of `Cooperative Effects in Plasmas'. The second Review is a collective work by different authors, and deals with recent results on `Relativistic interactions of laser-pulses with plasmas'. The first part of the book is based on B B Kadomtsev's written lectures for students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Although it begins with very general aspects of basic effects in plasmas such as Landau damping, waves, plasma echoes, two fluid MHD, it contains the more specialised material necessary to grasp the physical subtleties of laser-plasma interaction: nonlinear waves, solitons, self-focusing, three-wave processes with Manley-Rowe relations, wave-particle interaction, etc. In connection with the first part, the second review is an exhaustive presentation of recent works on the physics of laser-plasma interaction, and covers a wide range of nonlinear relativistic topics on plasmas interacting with high-intensity laser pulses. The various subjects are presented from a theoretical point of view, with special emphasis on the use of numerical simulations. The matter covered includes relativistically strong electromagnetic waves propagating in underdense plasmas, stimulated Raman scattering, filamentation and self-focusing, charged particle acceleration as well as photon acceleration. A special paragraph is devoted to the interaction of an ultra-short ultra-intense laser pulse with an overdense plasma. Although the first part can be read with profit by students, or physicists unfamiliar with nonlinear plasma physics, the second one is significantly more specialised. It is a systematic review of several areas of current research, with a concise presentation of the main results and exhaustive bibliographical references, rather than a detailed study of a few selected topics. The plasma physicist should find in it a valuable contribution for an exhaustive overview of laser-plasma phenomena. Students and physicists from other disciplines may profit from a more elementary introduction before addressing the second part of this book. Pierre Bertrand and Giovanni Manfredi