Related papers: Stern-Gerlach surfing in laser wakefield accelerat…
Relativistic electrons are easily generated by self-injection when an intense laser drives a wakefield in a plasma, giving rise to wide electron energy distributions. Several mechanisms involving additional laser beams or different gas…
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…
A new injection scheme using the interference of two coaxial laser pulses is proposed for generating high quality beams in laser wakefield accelerators. In this scheme, a relatively loosely focused laser pulse drives the plasma wakefield,…
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…
Plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) represent one of the promising new accelerator concepts that are now being developed intensively for future applications in high-energy physics and industry. Among the unresolved problems of practical…
Laser-plasma accelerators are expected to deliver electron bunches with high space charge fields. Several recent publications have addressed the impact of space charge effects on such bunches after the extraction into vacuum. Artifacts due…
We predict that electrons in an ion channel can gain ultra-relativistic energies by simultaneously interacting with a laser pulse and, counter-intuitively, with a decelerating electric field. The crucial role of the decelerating field is to…
We study the motion of a charged particle with magnetic moment in external electromagnetic fields utilizing covariant unification of Gilbertian and Amperian descriptions of particle magnetic dipole moment. Considering the case of a current…
We show that under appropriate conditions the impact of a very short and intense laser pulse onto a plasma causes the expulsion of surface electrons with high energy in the direction opposite to the one of propagation of the pulse. This is…
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are thought to originate from highly relativistic jets. The fireball model predicts internal shocks in the jets, causing magnetic field to be amplified and particles to be accelerated. We model the effects of an…
A laser pulse guided in a curved plasma channel can excite wakefields that steer electrons along an arched trajectory. As the electrons are accelerated along the curved channel, they emit synchrotron radiation. We present simple analytical…
Circularly polarized colliding laser pulses can create abundant electron-positron pair plasma [A. R. Bell and J. G. Kirk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 200403 (2008)], which scattering the incoming electromagnetic waves can prevent them from…
Due to their ultra-short duration and peak currents in the kA range, laser-wakefield accelerated electron bunches are promising drivers for ultrafast X-ray generation in compact free-electron-lasers (FELs), Thomson-scattering or betatron…
Experimental results, supported by precise modelling, demonstrate optimisation of a plasma-based injector with intermediate laser pulse energy ($<1$ J), corresponding to a normalised vector potential $a_0 = 2.15$, using ionisation injection…
We report a recently discovered counterintuitive effect where breaking of a Langmuir wave in a plasma wakefield accelerator leads to an increase in the accelerating field rather than wave dissipation. The effect relies on the ability of…
The injection of electrons into a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) is observed to generate an intense coherent ultra-broadband and ultrashort pulse radiation flash, consistent with the acceleration of electrons from rest to nearly the…
After the clasical approach to acceleration of a charged particle by delta-form impulsive force, we consider the corresponding quantum theory based on the Volkov solution of the Dirac equation. We determine the modified Compton formula for…
We report on electron wakefield acceleration in the resonant bubble regime with few-millijoule near-single-cycle laser pulses at a kilohertz repetition rate. Using very tight focusing of the laser pulse in conjunction with microscale…
We have investigated particle acceleration and emission from shocks and shear flows associated with an unmagnetized relativistic jet plasma propagating into an unmagnetized ambient plasma. Strong electro-magnetic fields are generated in the…
Laser wakefield acceleration permits the generation of ultra-short, high-brightness relativistic electron beams on a millimeter scale. While those features are of interest for many applications, the source remains constraint by the poor…