Physics of the interaction of ultra intense laser pulses with cold collisional plasma using large scale kinetic simulations

We present a set of 2D collisional particle-in-cell simulations of the interaction of ultra-intense laser pulses with over-dense cold collisional plasmas. The size of these simulations is about 100 times as large as those previously published. This allows studying the transport of energetic particles on time scale of the order of 400 fs without perturbations due to the influence of boundary effects and performing a very detailed analysis of the physics of the transport. We confirm the existence of a threshold in intensity close to the relativistic threshold above which the beam of energetic particles diverges when it penetrates the cold plasma. We also study the applicability of Ohm's law to compute the electric field, which is the method commonly used in hybrid codes. The heating of the cold plasma is then studied and we show that half of the heating is anomalous, i.e., not given by standard Joule effect. We discuss the previously published results in the light of these new simulations.