Related papers: Single-Shot Electron Radiography Using a Laser-Pla…
This dissertation explores the interaction between high-intensity lasers and plasmas to accelerate electrons and produce radiation via experimental and computational efforts. The laser pulses used in this dissertation have ultrashort…
Experimental measurements using the OMEGA EP laser facility demonstrated direct laser acceleration (DLA) of electron beams to (505 $\pm$ 75) MeV with (140 $\pm$ 30)~nC of charge from a low-density plasma target using a 400 J, picosecond…
Laser-plasma acceleration is an emerging technique for accelerating electrons to high energies over very short distances. The accelerated electron bunches have femtosecond duration, making them particularly relevant for applications such as…
We demonstrate laser-plasma acceleration of high charge electron beams to the ~10 MeV scale using ultrashort laser pulses with as little energy as 10 mJ. This result is made possible by an extremely dense and thin hydrogen gas jet. Total…
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…
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…
We generate a tabletop pulsed relativistic electron beam at 100 Hz repetition rate from vacuum laser acceleration (VLA) by tightly focusing a radially polarized beam into a low-density gas. We demonstrate that strong longitudinal electric…
Achieving high-quality electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators critically relies on density tailoring to control electron dynamics during injection, acceleration, and extraction. We report on the experimental observation of electron…
We present an experimental demonstration of the efficient acceleration of electrons beyond 60 MeV using micro-channel plasma targets. We employed a high-contrast, 2.5 J, 32 fs short pulse laser interacting with a 5 \mu m inner diameter, 300…
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 accelerated protons can be a complimentary source for treatment of oncological diseases to the existing hadron therapy facilities. We demonstrate how the protons, accelerated from near-critical density plasmas by laser pulses having…
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 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…
The plasma-based acceleration is an encouraging technique to overcome the limits of the accelerating gradient in the conventional RF acceleration. A plasma accelerator is able to provide accelerating fields up to hundreds of $GeV/m$, paving…
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…
Relativistic laser pulses can accelerate electrons up to energies of several GeV during the interaction with gaseous targets through the direct laser acceleration (DLA) mechanism. While the electrons are accelerated to high energies, they…
The necessity for compact table-top x-ray sources with higher brightness, shorter wavelength and shorter pulse duration has led to the development of complementary sources based on laser-plasma accelerators, in contrast to conventional…
Compact laser-driven accelerators are versatile and powerful tools of unarguable relevance on societal grounds for the diverse purposes of science, health, security, and technology because they bring enormous practicality to…
A new laser-proton acceleration structure combined by two relativistic electron shells, a suprathermal electron shell and a thermal electron cloud is proposed for $a\gtrapprox80\sigma_0$, where a is the normalized laser field and $\sigma_0$…
The excitation of surface plasmons with ultra-intense ($I\sim 5\times 10^{19}$ W/cm$^2$), high contrast ($\sim 10^{12}$) laser pulses on periodically-modulated solid targets has been recently demonstrated to produce collimated bunches of…