K. Poder
White paper to the Proceedings of the U.S. Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise (Snowmass 2021): Linear colliders based on laser-plasma accelerators
We describe a laser-plasma platform for photon-photon collision experiments to measure fundamental quantum electrodynamic processes such as the linear Breit-Wheeler process with real photons. The platform has been developed using the Gemini…
Betatron radiation from laser wakefield accelerators is an ultrashort pulsed source of hard, synchrotron-like x-ray radiation. It emanates from a centimetre scale plasma accelerator producing GeV level electron beams. In recent years…
The FLASHForward experimental facility is a high-performance test-bed for precision plasma-wakefield research, aiming to accelerate high-quality electron beams to GeV-levels in a few centimetres of ionised gas. The plasma is created by…
A tunable plasma-based energy dechirper has been developed at FLASHForward to remove the correlated energy spread of a 681~MeV electron bunch. Through the interaction of the bunch with wakefields excited in plasma the projected energy…
The experimental study of the dynamics of neutral electron-positron beams is an emerging area of research, enabled by the recent results on the generation of this exotic state of matter in the laboratory. Electron-positron beams and plasmas…
The description of the dynamics of an electron in an external electromagnetic field of arbitrary intensity is one of the most fundamental outstanding problems in electrodynamics. Remarkably, to date there is no unanimously accepted…
The dynamics of energetic particles in strong electromagnetic fields can be heavily influenced by the energy loss arising from the emission of radiation during acceleration, known as radiation reaction. When interacting with a high-energy…
We report on the first experimental observation of a current-driven instability developing in a quasi-neutral matter-antimatter beam. Strong magnetic fields ($\geq$ 1 T) are measured, via means of a proton radiography technique, after the…
We explore a regime of laser-driven plasma acceleration of electrons where the radial envelope of the laser-pulse incident at the plasma entrance is strongly mismatched to the nonlinear plasma electron response excited by it. This regime…
We present few-femtosecond shadowgraphic snapshots taken during the non-linear evolution of the plasma wave in a laser wakefield accelerator with transverse synchronized few-cycle probe pulses. These snapshots can be directly associated…
We report on the laser-driven generation of purely neutral, relativistic electron-positron pair plasmas. The overall charge neutrality, high average Lorentz factor ($\gamma_{e/p} \approx 15$), small divergence ($\theta_{e/p} \approx 10 -…
Laser-wakefield acceleration is a promising technique for the next generation of ultra-compact, high-energy particle accelerators. However, for a meaningful use of laser-driven particle beams it is necessary that they present a high degree…