The advent of chirped pulse amplification has brought the field of laser-matter interaction to relativistic regime. After a brief introduction, the talk will focus on how such interaction can be controlled with novel designed target structure, that leads to promising applications to particle accelerators and radiation sources, as well as interesting physical processes such as spin-orbital interaction of light. The perspectives in laboratory astrophysics will be discussed, as in the regime of interest, the laser-matter interaction exhibit relativistic processes similar to some astrophysical phenomena. A study on relativistic magnetic reconnection will be given as an example. 

Dr. Longqing Yi received Ph.D. in plasma physics in 2014 from Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was then a postdoc researcher at Düsseldorf University in Germany for two years. Since 2017, Dr. Yi joined the subatomic and plasma physics department at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, where he works on numerical simulations of relativistic laser-plasma interactions. Dr. Yi’s research works cover many topics in the related field, he has published 9 first-author papers in peer-reviewed journals (including 3 in PRL and Nat. Comm.). He is currently the PI of one Olle Engkvist project ("Applications of laser-plasma interaction in waveguides") in Sweden.