Related papers: Compact Petawatt-Class Laser Wakefield Acceleratio…
A laser pulse traveling through a plasma can excite large amplitude plasma waves that can be used to accelerate relativistic electron beams in a very short distance---a technique called laser wakefield acceleration. Many wakefield…
Next-generation plasma-based accelerators can push electron beams to GeV energies within centimetre distances. The plasma, excited by a driver pulse, is indeed able to sustain huge electric fields that can efficiently accelerate a trailing…
The optimal performance of adaptive optics systems can only be maintained if the wavefront reference is bright and compact. Experience has shown that both of these important criteria are remarkably difficult to achieve with laser guide…
Reflection at relativistically moving plasma mirrors is a well-known approach for frequency conversion as an alternative to nonlinear techniques. A key issue with plasma mirrors is the need for a high carrier concentration, of order 10^21…
The FLASHForward experimental facility is a high-performance test-bed for precision plasma-wakefield research, aiming to accelerate high-quality electron beams to GeV-levels in a few centimetres of ionised gas. The plasma is created by…
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…
The scaling laws for laser wakefield acceleration in the nonlinear, self-guided regime [Lu et al. Phys. Rev. Spec. Top. Accel. Beams 10, 061301 (2007)] are examined in detail using the quasi-3D version of the particle-in-cell code OSIRIS.…
The excitation of wakefields by a triangular temporal profile laser pulse with an abrupt fall in a step density profile plasma channel is investigated analytically and an exact solution is obtained. The excitation is more efficient for…
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…
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…
The energy gain in laser wakefield accelerators is limited by dephasing between the driving laser pulse and the highly relativistic electrons in its wake. Since this phase depends on both the driver and the cavity length, the effects of…
Precise characterization and tailoring of the spatial and temporal evolution of plasma density within plasma sources is critical for realizing high-quality accelerated beams in plasma wakefield accelerators. The simultaneous use of two…
Matched beam loading in laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), characterizing the state of flattening of the acceleration electric field along the bunch, leads to the minimization of energy spread at high bunch charges. Here, we demonstrate…
In the presence of an external magnetic field, wake fields generated by a short laser pulse can propagate out of the plasma, and thereby provide information about the electron density profile. A method for reconstructing the density profile…
The one-dimensional wakefield generation equations are solved for increasing levels of non-linearity, to demonstrate how they contribute to the overall behaviour of a non-linear wakefield in a plasma. The effect of laser guiding is also…
Fourier ptychographic (FP) microscope is a coherent imaging method that can synthesize an image with a higher bandwidth using multiple low-bandwidth images captured at different spatial frequency regions. The method's demand for multiple…
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.…
We present a new concept for a plasma wakefield accelerator driven by magnetowaves (MPWA). This concept was originally proposed as a viable mechanism for the "cosmic accelerator" that would accelerate cosmic particles to ultra high energies…
The two-temperature relativistic electron spectrum from a low-density ($3\times10^{17}$~cm$^{-3}$) self-modulated laser wakefield accelerator (SM-LWFA) is observed to transition between temperatures of $19\pm0.65$ and $46\pm2.45$ MeV at an…
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…