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Guiding relativistically intense laser pulses in low-density plasmas enables extended acceleration lengths in laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs), allowing for the production of multi-GeV electron beams. Quantitative interpretation of such…
Plasma wakefields offer high acceleration gradients, orders of magnitude larger than conventional RF accelerators. However, the achievable luminosity remains relatively low, typically limited by repetition rate and the charge accelerated…
Despite the successful demonstration of compact free electron lasers (FELs) driven by laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs), the pursuit of further enhancements in high-gain compact FELs presents a challenge due to the limitations in…
Injection of well-defined, high-quality electron populations into plasma waves is a key challenge of plasma wakefield accelerators. Here, we report on the first experimental demonstration of plasma density downramp injection in an…
Laser-driven plasma wakefields can provide hundreds of MeV electron beam in mm-range distances potentially shrinking the dimension of the actual particle accelerators. The plasma density plays a fundamental role in the control and stability…
We demonstrate experimentally the resonant excitation of plasma waves by trains of laser pulses. We also take an important first step to achieving an energy recovery plasma accelerator by showing that unused wakefield energy can be removed…
We present the first demonstration of multi-GeV laser wakefield acceleration in a fully optically formed plasma waveguide, with an acceleration gradient as high as 25 GeV/m. The guide was formed via self-waveguiding of <15 J, 45 fs (<~300…
Laser wakefield accelerator experiments have made enormous progress over the past $\sim 20$ years, but their promise to revolutionize high-energy particle sources is only beginning to be realized. To make the next step toward engineering…
Plasma accelerators driven by intense laser or particle beams provide gigavolt-per-meter accelerating fields, promising to drastically shrink particle accelerators for high-energy physics and photon science. Applications such as linear…
The simultaneous laser-driven acceleration and angular manipulation of the fast electron beam is experimentally demonstrated. The bunch of multi-MeV energy charged particles is generated during the propagation of the femtosecond laser pulse…
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…
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 scaling laws for laser wakefield acceleration in the nonlinear, self-guided regime [Lu et al. Phys. Rev. Spec. Top. Accel. Beams 10, 061301 (2007)] are examined in detail using the quasi-3D version of the particle-in-cell code OSIRIS.…
A quantum kinetic equation coupled with Maxwell's equation is used to estimate the laser power required at an XFEL facility to expose intrinsically quantum effects in the process of QED vacuum decay via spontaneous pair production. A 9…
We present methods and preliminary observations of two pulse Direct Laser Acceleration in a Laser-Driven Plasma Accelerator. This acceleration mechanism uses a second co-propagating laser pulse to overlap and further accelerate electrons in…
Ultrafast pump-probe experiments open the possibility to track fundamental material behaviour like changes in its electronic configuration in real time. To date, most of these experiments are performed using an electron or a high-energy…
We estimate the average flux density of minimally-coupled axion-like particles generated by a laser-driven plasma wakefield propagating along a constant strong magnetic field. Our calculations suggest that a terrestrial source based on this…
Laser-plasma accelerators produce electric fields of the order of 100 GV/m, more than 1000 times larger than radio-frequency accelerators. Thanks to this unique field strength, they appear as a promising path to generate electron beams…
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…
Plasma wakefields can enable very high accelerating gradients for frontier high energy particle accelerators, in excess of 10 GeV/m. To overcome limits on total acceleration achievable, specially shaped drive beams can be used in both…