Towards high intensity few-cycle pulses using plasma wakefield self-compression effect

We present experimental results for laser pulse compression due to wakefield excitation in the relativistic regime using the SPIDER technique for complete pulse characterization. The results indicate that the pulse was compressed to 10 fs duration which has been verified by 3D PIC simulations showing the possibility of getting laser pulses of few-cycle duration. These results were also verified by using a hydrodynamic code. The scalability of the latter allows to extend the wakefield compression scheme to the petawatt level, thus making it a route to PW-class few-cycle pulse generation.