Related papers: Axiparabola: a new tool for high-intensity optics
We show that the properties of the electron beam and bright x-rays produced by a laser wakefield accelerator can be predicted if the distance over which the laser self-focuses and compresses prior to self-injection is taken into account. A…
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…
Plasma lensing is the refraction of low-frequency electromagnetic rays due to free electrons in the interstellar medium. Although the phenomenon has a distinct similarity to gravitational lensing, particularly in its mathematical…
Laser-plasma technology promises a drastic reduction of the size of high energy electron accelerators. It could make free electron lasers available to a broad scientific community, and push further the limits of electron accelerators for…
Spatiotemporal control over the intensity of a laser pulse has the potential to enable or revolutionize a wide range of laser-based applications that currently suffer from the poor flexibility offered by conventional optics. Specifically,…
Optical modulators can be made nowadays with high modulation speed, broad bandwidth, while being compact, owing to the recent advance in material science and microfabrication technology. However, these optical modulators usually work for…
Superpositions of paraxial laser beam modes to generate atom-optical lenses based on the optical dipole force are investigated theoretically. Thin, wide, parabolic, cylindrical and circular atom lenses with numerical apertures much greater…
High-quality and prebunched electron beams can produce coherent x-rays with high intensity and narrow bandwidth, which is essential for modern light sources. An all-optical scheme based on plasma-based acceleration to produce bright…
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…
We show that it is possible to independently control both the trajectory and the maximum amplitude along the trajectory of a paraxial accelerating beam. This is accomplished by carefully engineering both the amplitude and the phase of the…
Plasma-Based Acceleration (PBA) has been demonstrated using laser, electron, and proton drivers. However, significant challenges remain in achieving high efficiency, stable acceleration, and scalable energy gain. Heavy ion beam drivers,…
We present recent results on high-power guiding and laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) in the ELBA beamline at ELI Beamlines, using the L3-HAPLS laser system (13 J, 30 fs, 0.2 Hz). By employing self-waveguiding in a 20 cm plasma channel in…
It is shown that plasma-based optics can be used to guide and focus highly divergent laser-generated ion beams. A hollow cylinder is considered, which initially contains a hot electron population. Plasma streaming toward the cylinder axis…
We propose a novel scheme for controlling the injection of a high-quality electron bunch into a channel-guided laser plasma accelerator. This all-optical technique, constricted waveguide injection, creates a highly tunable controlled…
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…
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 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 wakefield accelerators rely on relativistically moving micron-sized plasma cavities that provide extremely high electric field >100GV/m. Here, we demonstrate transverse shaping of the plasma cavity to produce controlled sub-GeV…
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…
We present a novel method for aligning a laser ionized plasma source to a pair of ultra-relativistic electron beams that comprise a plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA). We achieve alignment by analyzing the plasma afterglow light observed…