Related papers: Self-guided wakefield experiments driven by petawa…
The concept of a hybrid laser wakefield/direct laser plasma accelerator is proposed. Relativistic electrons undergoing resonant betatron oscillations inside the plasma bubble created by a laser pulse are accelerated by gaining energy…
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…
Plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) is a novel acceleration technique with promising prospects for both particle colliders and light sources. However, PWFA research has so far been limited to a few large-scale accelerator facilities…
Laser and beam driven wakefields promise orders of magnitude increases in electric field gradients for particle accelerators for future applications. Key areas to explore include the emittance properties of the generated beams and…
The one-dimensional wakefield generation equations are solved for increasing levels of non-linearity, to demonstrate how they contribute to the overall behaviour of a non-linear wakefield in a plasma. The effect of laser guiding is also…
We present a novel electron injection scheme for plasma wakefield acceleration. The method is based on recently proposed technique of fast electron generation via laser-solid interaction: a femtosecond laser pulse with the energy of tens of…
In the frame of laser-driven wakefield acceleration, the main characteristics oflaser propagation and plasma wave excitation are described, with an emphasis onthe role of propagation distance for electron acceleration. To…
We report on the depletion and power amplification of the driving laser pulse in a strongly-driven laser wakefield accelerator. Simultaneous measurement of the transmitted pulse energy and temporal shape indicate an increase in peak power…
The physics of energy transfer between the laser and the plasma in laser wakefield accelerators is studied. We find that wake excitation by arbitrary laser shapes can be parameterized using the total pulse energy and pulse depletion length.…
Wakefield acceleration methods are known due to some their advantages. The main of them is the high accelerating gradient up to several teravolts per meter. In the paper another important advantage is concluded to the possibility of using a…
We measure the emission of energetic electrons from the interaction between ultrashort laser pulses and a solid density plasma in the relativistic regime. We detect an electron beam that only appears with few-cycle pulses (< 10 fs) and…
Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) have electric fields that are orders of magnitude larger than those of conventional accelerators, promising an attractive, small-scale alternative for next-generation light sources and lepton colliders.…
The electric field in laser-driven plasma wakefield acceleration is orders of magnitude higher than conventional radio-frequency cavities, but the energy gain is limited by dephasing between the ultra-relativistic electron bunch and the…
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 experimental measurements of energy transfer efficiencies in a GeV-class laser wakefield accelerator. Both the transfer of energy from the laser to the plasma wakefield, and from the plasma to the accelerated electron beam were…
Laser wakefield acceleration relies on the excitation of a plasma wave due to the ponderomotive force of an intense laser pulse. However, plasma wave trains in the wake of the laser have scarcely been studied directly in experiments. Here…
We report on an experimental demonstration of laser wakefield electron acceleration using a sub-TW power laser by tightly focusing 30-fs laser pulses with only 8 mJ pulse energy on a 100 \mu m scale gas target. The experiments are carried…
Focusing petawatt-level laser beams to a variety of spot sizes for different applications is expensive in cost, labor and space. In this paper, we propose a plasma lens to flexibly resize the laser beam by utilizing the laser self-focusing…
The discovery of laser wakefield acceleration in gaseous plasma was a major milestone that could lead to a significant reduction of size and cost of large electron accelerators. For higher-energy laser-driven electron acceleration guiding…
We study the energetics of wake excitation during the laser-plasma interaction in application to laser wakefield accelerators. We find that both the wake amplitude and the accelerating efficiency (transformer ratio) can be maximized by…