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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…
The goal of this paper is to examine experimental progress in laser wakefield acceleration over the past decade (2004-2014), and to use trends in the data to understand some of the important physical processes. By examining a set of over 50…
Electron self-injection and acceleration until dephasing in the blowout regime is studied for a set of initial conditions typical of recent experiments with 100 terawatt-class lasers. Two different approaches to computationally efficient,…
The wake field excitation in an unmagnetized plasma by a multi-petawatt, femtosecond, pancake-shaped laser pulse is described both analytically and numerically in the regime with ultrarelativistic electron jitter velocities, when the plasma…
In the design of laser plasma electron injectors for multi-stage laser driven wakefield accelerators, the control of plasma density is a key element to stabilize the acceleration process. A cell with variable parameters is used to confine…
Frequency up-shifting of laser light in a beam-driven plasma wakefield has the potential to provide high-intensity sources of short wavelength radiation. Simulations have demonstrated that a laser pulse can undergo large frequency shifts,…
We report on the first results of laser plasma wakefield acceleration driven by ultrashort mid-infrared laser pulses (\lambda= 3.9 \mu m, 100 fs, 0.25 TW), which enable near- and above-critical density interactions with moderate-density gas…
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…
Plasma accelerators can sustain very high acceleration gradients. They are promising candidates for future generations of particle accelerators for several scientific, medical and technological applications. Current plasma based…
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 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…
Plasma wakefield acceleration is a method for accelerating particle beams using electromagnetic fields that are orders of magnitude larger than those found in conventional radio frequency cavities. The core component of a plasma wakefield…
The physics of energy transfer between the laser and the plasma in laser wakefield accelerators is studied. We find that wake excitation by arbitrary laser shapes can be parameterized using the total pulse energy and pulse depletion length.…
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…
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…
This work provides a brief review of the numerical methods for modelling the optical propagation of an ultrashort, intense laser pulse in plasmas and ionizable gases. These methods are implemented in an open-source simulation toolkit…
Since it is possible to form laser pulses with a frequency much larger than the frequency of visible light, Prof. T.Tajima proposed using such pulse to accelerate the particles at its injection into the crystal. Here, the wakefield…
Three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are used to investigate the interaction of ultrahigh intensity lasers ($> 10^{20}$ W/cm$^{-2}$) with matter at overcritical densities. Intense laser pulses are shown to penetrate up…
Ultra intense lasers are a promising source of energetic ions for various applications. An interesting approach described in Ferri et al. 2019 argues from Particle-in-Cell simulations that using two laser pulses of half energy (half…
We propose a setup for positron acceleration consisting of an electron driver and a laser pulse creating a two-fold plasma column structure. The resulting wakefield is capable of accelerating positron bunches over long distances even when…