  In laser-solid interactions, electrons may be generated and subsequently
accelerated to energies of the order-of-magnitude of the ponderomotive limit,
with the underlying process dominated by direct laser acceleration. Breaking
this limit, realized here by a radially-polarized laser pulse incident upon a
wire target, can be associated with several novel effects. Three-dimensional
Particle-In-Cell simulations show a relativistic intense laser pulse can
extract electrons from the wire and inject them into the accelerating field.
Anti-dephasing, resulting from collective plasma effects, are shown here to
enhance the accelerated electron energy by two orders of magnitude compared to
the ponderomotive limit. It is demonstrated that ultra-short radially polarized
pulses produce super-ponderomotive electrons more efficiently than pulses of
the linear and circular polarization varieties.
