Related papers: Compact Petawatt-Class Laser Wakefield Acceleratio…
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) and its particle-driven counterpart, plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA), are commonly treated as separate, though related branches of high-gradient plasma-based acceleration. However, novel proposed…
The injection of electrons into a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) is observed to generate an intense coherent ultra-broadband and ultrashort pulse radiation flash, consistent with the acceleration of electrons from rest to nearly the…
The energy gain in laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is ultimately limited by dephasing, occurring when accelerated electrons outrun the accelerating phase of the wakefield. We apply quasi-phasematching, enabled by axially modulated…
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…
Due to its unique advantages, wakefield particle acceleration has been proposed as a promising pathway toward a 10 TeV collider. Several concepts, including Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA), Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA), and…
In a laser plasma accelerator (LPA), a short and intense laser pulse propagating in a plasma drives a wakefield (a plasma wave with a relativistic phase velocity) that can sustain extremely large electric fields, enabling compact…
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…
We propose a hybrid laser-driven ion acceleration scheme using a combination target of a solid foil and a density-tailored background plasma. In the first stage, a sub-relativistic proton beam can be generated by the radiation pressure…
Free-electron lasers (FELs) provide a revolutionary tool for capturing the structure and dynamics of matter in real time at the atomic scale. The size and cost of FELs can be substantially reduced by using laser wakefield acceleration…
We present significant advances in Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) operating at a 1 kHz repetition rate, employing a sub-TW, few-femtosecond laser and a continuously flowing hydrogen gas target. We conducted the first comprehensive…
Achieving high-quality electron beams from laser wakefield accelerators critically relies on density tailoring to control electron dynamics during injection, acceleration, and extraction. We report on the experimental observation of…
The electric field in laser-driven plasma wakefield acceleration is orders of magnitude higher than conventional radio-frequency cavities, but the energy gain is limited by dephasing between the ultra-relativistic electron bunch and the…
Despite the successful demonstration of compact free electron lasers (FELs) driven by laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs), the pursuit of further enhancements in high-gain compact FELs presents a challenge due to the limitations in…
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…
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…
We measure the high intensity laser propagation throughout meter-scale, channel-guided LPAs by adjusting the length of the plasma channel on a shot-by-shot basis, showing high quality guiding of 500 TW laser pulses over 30 cm in a hydrogen…
Plasma wakefields can enable very high accelerating gradients for frontier high energy particle accelerators, in excess of 10 GeV/m. To overcome limits on total acceleration achievable, specially shaped drive beams can be used in both…
Plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) represent one of the promising new accelerator concepts that are now being developed intensively for future applications in high-energy physics and industry. Among the unresolved problems of practical…
Laser wakefield acceleration relies on the excitation of a plasma wave due to the ponderomotive force of an intense laser pulse. However, plasma wave trains in the wake of the laser have scarcely been studied directly in experiments. Here…
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…