Related papers: Ponderomotive Acceleration by Relativistic Waves
In a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA), an intense laser pulse excites a plasma wave that traps and accelerates electrons to relativistic energies. When the pulse overlaps the accelerated electrons, it can enhance the energy gain through…
We examine a regime in which a linearly-polarized laser pulse with relativistic intensity irradiates a sub-critical plasma for much longer than the characteristic electron response time. A steady-state channel is formed in the plasma in…
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…
The phenomenon of resonant energization of a relativistic quantum particle, moving in unison with an intense ElectroMagnetic Wave, is demonstrated in a semiclassical calculation. The wave nature of the quantum particle is of essence because…
The physics governing electron acceleration by a relativistically intense laser are not confined to the critical density surface, they also pervade the sub-critical plasma in front of the target. Here, particles can gain many times the…
We show through experiments that a transition from laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) regime to a plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) regime can drive electrons up to energies close to the GeV level. Initially, the acceleration mechanism…
We report on the first results of laser plasma wakefield acceleration driven by ultrashort mid-infrared laser pulses (\lambda= 3.9 \mu m, 100 fs, 0.25 TW), which enable near- and above-critical density interactions with moderate-density gas…
We briefly give some of the characteristics of the beam-driven, plasma-based particle accelerator known as the plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA). We also mention some of the major results that have been obtained since the birth of the…
It is shown that co-linear injection of electrons or positrons into the wakefield of the self-modulating particle beam is possible and ensures high energy gain. The witness beam must co-propagate with the tail part of the driver, since the…
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,…
The oscillation-center Hamiltonian is derived for a relativistic electron injected with an arbitrary momentum in a linearly polarized laser pulse propagating in tenuous plasma, assuming that the pulse length is smaller than the plasma…
We undertake an investigation of particle acceleration in the context of non-linear electrodynamics. We deduce the maximum energy that an electron can gain in a non-linear density wave in a magnetised plasma, and we show that an electron…
Self-guided femtosecond laser pulses propagating in low-pressure gas can generate plasma filaments, establishing a new framework for plasma wakefield acceleration. Unlike conventional schemes relying on mechanically confined or preformed…
In the past decades, beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) experiments have seen remarkable progress by using high-energy particle beams such as electron, positron and proton beams to drive wakes in neutral gas or pre-ionized…
The dependence of the mean kinetic energy of laser-accelerated electrons on the laser intensity, so-called ponderomotive scaling, was derived theoretically with consideration of the motion of a single electron in oscillating laser fields.…
We revisit the exact microscopic equations (in differential, and equivalent integral form) ruling a relativistic cold plasma after the plane-wave Ansatz, without customary approximations. We show that in the Eulerian description the motion…
The secular dynamics of a non-relativistic charged particle in an electromagnetic wave can be described by the ponderomotive potential. Although ponderomotive electron-laser interactions at relativistic velocities are important for emerging…
A cosmic acceleration mechanism is introduced which is based on the wakefields excited by the Alfven shocks in a relativistically flowing plasma, where the energy gain per distance of a test particle is Lorentz invariant. We show that there…
A new regime of proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration is discovered, in which the plasma nonlinearity increases the phase velocity of the excited wave compared to that of the protons. If the beam charge is much larger than minimally…
Plasma wakefield acceleration, either laser driven or electron-bunch driven, has been demonstrated to hold great potential. However, it is not obvious how to scale these approaches to bring particles up to the TeV regime. In this paper, we…