Related papers: Polarized electron-beam acceleration driven by vor…
While laser-plasma accelerators have demonstrated a strong potential in the acceleration of electrons up to giga-electronvolt energies, few experimental tools for studying the acceleration physics have been developed. In this paper, we…
Laser-plasma accelerators present a promising alternative to conventional accelerators. To fully exploit the extreme amplitudes of the plasma fields and produce high-quality beams, precise control over electron injection into the…
Enhancing the ability to resolve axial details is crucial in three-dimensional optical imaging. We provide experimental evidence showcasing the ultimate precision achievable in axial localization using vortex beams. For Laguerre-Gauss (LG)…
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…
Relativistic positron beams are required for fundamental research in nonlinear strong field QED, plasma physics, and laboratory astrophysics. Positrons are difficult to create and manipulate due to their short lifetime, and their energy…
It is shown that well collimated mono-energetic ion beams with a large particle number can be generated in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration regime by using an elliptically polarized laser pulse with appropriate theoretically…
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 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…
Exact closed-form solutions to Maxwell's equations are used to investigate the acceleration of electrons in vacuum driven by ultrashort and nonparaxial radially polarized laser pulses. We show that the threshold power above which…
The ionization-induced injection in laser wakefield acceleration has been recently demonstrated to be a promising injection scheme. However, the energy spread controlling in this mechanism remains a challenge because continuous injection in…
Plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) is a novel acceleration technique with promising prospects for both particle colliders and light sources. However, PWFA research has so far been limited to a few large-scale accelerator facilities…
We use phase-shifting digital holography to measure the amplitude and phase of twisted light. In our experiment, a spatial light modulator generates the studied vortex beams in addition to a co-propagating reference beam with a controllable…
A planar laser pulse propagating in vacuum can exhibit an extremely large ponderomotive force. This force, however, cannot impart net energy to an electron: As the pulse overtakes the electron, the initial impulse from its rising edge is…
We present an easy, efficient and fast method to generate arbitrary linear combinations of light orbital angular momentum eigenstates $\ell=\pm 2$ starting from a linearly polarized TEM$_{00}$ laser beam. The method exploits the…
We present the process of ion acceleration using ultra-thin foils irradiated by elliptically polarized, high-intensity laser pulses. Recently, efficient generation of monoenergetic ion beams was introduced using the concept of laser-ion…
Laser wakefield accelerators are on the way to provide GeV scale high-brightness electron beams for multidisciplinary applications. In the present work, electron bunches are studied in the framework of a Free-Electron Laser driven by an…
We demonstrate laser wakefield acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches up to 15 MeV at 1 kHz repetition rate with 2.5 pC charge per bunch and a core with < 7 mrad beam divergence. Acceleration is driven by 5 fs, < 2.7 mJ laser…
We study the energetics of wake excitation during the laser-plasma interaction in application to laser wakefield accelerators. We find that both the wake amplitude and the accelerating efficiency (transformer ratio) can be maximized by…
Pinching of the driver beam in plasma wakefield acceleration is generally considered an unwanted effect that needs to be mitigated. Here, we propose that this effect can be utilized for the injection of spin-polarized electron beams from…
A new regime is described for Radiation Pressure Acceleration of a thin foil by an intense laser beam of above 10^20 W/cm^2. Highly monoenergetic proton beams extending to GeV energies can be produced with very high efficiency using…