Related papers: Alternating Phase Focusing for Dielectric Laser Ac…
Particle accelerators are essential tools in science, hospitals and industry. Yet, their costs and large footprint, ranging in length from meters to several kilometres, limit their use. The recently demonstrated nanophotonics-based…
Dielectric laser acceleration of electrons close to a fused-silica grating has recently been observed (Peralta et al., Nature 503, 91 (2013); Breuer, Hommelhoff, PRL 111, 134803 (2013)). Here we present the theoretical description of the…
A new electron acceleration mechanism is identified that develops when a relativistically intense laser irradiates the wedge of an over-dense plasma. This induces a diffracted electromagnetic wave with a significant longitudinal electric…
Laser-accelerated electron beams have been created at a kHz repetition rate from the {\it reflection} of intense ($\sim10^{18}$ W/cm$^2$), $\sim$40 fs laser pulses focused on a continuous water-jet in an experiment at the Air Force Research…
We study hollow plasma channels with smooth boundaries for laser-driven electron acceleration in the bubble regime. Contrary to the uniform plasma case, the laser forms no optical shock and no etching at the front. This increases the…
Laser wakefield accelerators rely on the extremely high electric fields of nonlinear plasma waves to trap and accelerate electrons to relativistic energies over short distances. When driven strongly enough, plasma waves break, trapping a…
Experimental results, supported by precise modelling, demonstrate optimisation of a plasma-based injector with intermediate laser pulse energy ($<1$ J), corresponding to a normalised vector potential $a_0 = 2.15$, using ionisation injection…
The advance in laser plasma acceleration techniques pushes the regime of the resulting accelerated particles to higher energies and intensities. In particular the upcoming experiments with the FLAME laser at LNF will enter the GeV regime…
Direct laser acceleration has proven to be an efficient source of high-charge electron bunches and high brilliance X-rays. However, an analytical description of the acceleration in the interaction with varying plasma density targets is…
The next generation of Petawatt-class lasers presents the opportunity to study positron production and acceleration experimentally, in an all-optical setting. Several configurations were proposed to produce and accelerate positrons in a…
We investigate a single-laser scheme for reaching the strong-field QED regime based on direct laser acceleration (DLA) of electrons followed by their head-on collision with the same laser pulse reflected from an overdense foil. In this…
Magnetic Vortex Acceleration (MVA) from near critical density targets is one of the promising schemes of laser-driven ion acceleration. 3D particle-in-cell simulations are used to explore a more extensive laser-target parameter space than…
Many current laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) experiments are carried out in a regime where the laser pulse length is on the order of or longer than the wake wavelength and where ionization injection is employed to inject electrons into…
The large gradients of plasma-wakefield accelerators promise to shorten accelerators and reduce their financial and environmental costs. For such accelerators, a key challenge is the transport of beams with high divergence and energy…
Laser-induced electron diffraction is an evolving tabletop method, which aims to image ultrafast structural changes in gas-phase polyatomic molecules with sub-{\AA}ngstr\"om spatial and femtosecond temporal resolution. Here, we provide the…
In addition to the ponderomotive acceleration of highly relativistic electrons at interaction of very short and very intense laser pulses, a further acceleration is derived from the interaction of these electron beams with the spontaneous…
A Compact laser plasma accelerator (CLAPA) is being built in Peking University, which is based on RPA-PSA mechanism or other acceleration mechanisms. According to the beam parameters from preparatory experiments and theoretical simulations,…
Autoresonant phase-locking of the plasma wakefield to the beat frequency of two driving lasers offers advantages over conventional wakefield acceleration methods, since it requires less demanding laser parameters and is robust to variations…
Staging laser wake-field acceleration is considered as a necessary technique for developing full-optical jitter-free electron accelerators. Splitting of the acceleration length into several technical parts with their lengths smaller than…
Wakefield accelerators are under development in many laboratories worldwide. They bring the promise of a high accelerating gradient, orders of magnitude higher than current machines. The reduction in the overall length of the accelerators…