Related papers: Laser beam coupling with capillary discharge plasm…
Plasma accelerators utilize strong electric fields in plasma waves to accelerate charged particles, making them a compact alternative to radiofrequency technologies. Discharge capillaries are plasma sources used in plasma accelerator…
A method of creating plasma channels with controllable depth and transverse profile for the guiding of short, high power laser pulses for efficient electron acceleration is proposed. The plasma channel produced by the hydrogen-filled…
Multistage coupling of laser-wakefield accelerators is essential to overcome laser energy depletion for high-energy applications such as TeV level electron-positron colliders. Current staging schemes feed subsequent laser pulses into stages…
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 this dissertation, a fully object-oriented, fully relativistic, multi-dimensional Particle-In-Cell code was developed and applied to answer key questions in plasma-based accelerator research. The simulations increase the understanding of…
Laser-plasma accelerators offer a compact means of producing high-energy electron beams, but their performance is fundamentally limited by dephasing between the accelerated electrons and the plasma wave. To overcome this limitation, we…
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…
Propagation distances of intense laser pulses and high-charge electron beams through the plasma are, respectively, limited by diffraction and self-deceleration. This imposes severe constraints on the performance of the two major advanced…
In view of future applications of plasma-based particle accelerators, within the fields of high-energy physics and new light sources, the capability of plasma sources to operate at high repetition rates is crucial. In particular for…
The resources needed for Particle in Cell simulations of Laser Wakefield Acceleration can be greatly reduced in many cases of interest using an envelope model. However, the inclusion of tunneling ionization in this time averaged treatment…
Plasma wakefield accelerators are capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-centimeter accelerating fields, surpassing the electric breakdown threshold in state-of-the-art accelerator modules by 3-4 orders of magnitude. Beam-driven wakefields…
We use Bayesian optimization in combination with three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations to determine the optimal laser and plasma parameters that, for a given laser pulse energy, maximize the cut-off energy of an electron beam…
Plasma confinement inside capillaries has been developed in the past years for plasma-based acceleration to ensure a stable and repeatable plasma density distribution during the interaction with either particles or laser beams. In…
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…
The channeling of laser pulses in waveguides filled with a rare plasma is one of promising techniques of laser wakefield acceleration. A solid-state capillary can precisely guide tightly focused pulses. Regardless of the material of the…
All-optical controlled injection and acceleration of electrons in a laser wakefield has recently been achieved (Faure et al, Nature v. 444 p. 737, 2006). Injection was made using a second counterpropagating laser pulse with the same…
We propose to use tightly focused lasers to generate high quality electron beams in laser wakefield accelerators. In this scheme, the expansion of the laser beam after the focal position enlarges the size of wakefield bubble, which reduces…
The excitation of plasma waves over a length of up to 8 centimeters is, for the first time, demon- strated using laser guiding of intense laser pulses through hydrogen filled glass capillary tubes. The plasma waves are diagnosed by spectral…
Plasma-based acceleration schemes have attracted sustained interest as a pathway toward compact particle accelerators, owing to the large electric fields supported by plasmas. Although recent studies have demonstrated the excitation of…
We use the quasi-static particle-in-cell code QuickPIC to perform full-scale, one-to-one LWFA numerical experiments, with parameters that closely follow current experimental conditions. The propagation of state-of-the-art laser pulses in…