Teravolt-per-meter plasma wakefields from low-charge, femtosecond electron beams
Abstract
Recent initiatives in ultra-short, GeV electron beam generation have focused on achieving sub-fs pulses for driving X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) in single-spike mode. This scheme employs very low charge beams, which may allow existing FEL injectors to produce few-100 as pulses, with high brightness. Towards this end, recent experiments at SLAC have produced ~2 fs rms, low transverse emittance, 20 pC electron pulses. Here we examine use of such pulses to excite plasma wakefields exceeding 1 TV/m. We present a focusing scheme capable of producing ~200 nm beam sizes, where the surface Coulomb fields are also ~TV/m. These conditions access a new regime for high field atomic physics, allowing frontier experiments, including sub-fs plasma formation for wake excitation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1002.1976,
title = {Teravolt-per-meter plasma wakefields from low-charge, femtosecond electron beams},
author = {J. B. Rosenzweig and G. Andonian and P. Bucksbaum and M. Ferrario and S. Full and A. Fukusawa and E. Hemsing and M. Hogan and P. Krejcik and P. Muggli and G. Marcus and A. Marinelli and P. Musumeci and B. O'Shea and C. Pellegrini and D. Schiller and G. Travish},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.1976},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Preprint, 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters