Exploiting the angular momentum of intense light for exotic plasma acceleration

Exotic lasers are beams with orbital angular momentum and are described by higher order Laguerre Gaussian modes. These lasers have been leading to transformative scientific advance in applications ranging from ultrafast communications and super-resolution microscopy to quantum computing and astrophysics. This talk addresses how to create, manipulate, and amplify these lasers to high intensities through stimulated Raman backscattering in plasmas. At relativistic intensities, these exotic beams can be used to drive relativistic plasma waves with new structures suitable for producing ring electron bunches and for positron acceleration in strongly non-linear regimes. We show that similar physics can also be obtained by using suitably tailored particle bunches. We illustrate our findings using theory and three-dimensional particle-in-cell OSIRIS simulations.