Related papers: First Electron Acceleration in a Tunable-Velocity …
Laser wakefield accelerator experiments have made enormous progress over the past $\sim 20$ years, but their promise to revolutionize high-energy particle sources is only beginning to be realized. To make the next step toward engineering…
Shot-to-shot fluctuations in electron beams from laser wakefield accelerators present a significant challenge for applications. Here, we show that instead of using such fluctuating beams directly, employing them to drive a plasma…
Using a laser plasma accelerator, experiments with a 80 TW and 30 fs laser pulse demonstrated quasi-monoenergetic electron spectra with maximum energy over 0.4 GeV. This is achieved using a supersonic He gas jet and a sharp density ramp…
Driving laser wakefield acceleration with extremely short, near single-cycle laser pulses is crucial to the realisation of an electron source that can operate at kHz-repetition rate while relying on modest laser energy. It is also…
In a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA), an intense laser pulse excites a plasma wave that traps and accelerates electrons to relativistic energies. When the pulse overlaps the accelerated electrons, it can enhance the energy gain through…
Using plasma mirror injection we demonstrate, both analytically and numerically, that a circularly polarized helical laser pulse can accelerate highly collimated dense bunches of electrons to several hundred MeV using currently available…
We demonstrate laser wakefield acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches up to 15 MeV at 1 kHz repetition rate with 2.5 pC charge per bunch and a core with < 7 mrad beam divergence. Acceleration is driven by 5 fs, < 2.7 mJ laser…
Intense femtosecond laser pulses interacting with solids can drive electrons to relativistic energies, enabling miniaturized particle accelerators and bright extreme-ultraviolet light sources. In-situ space-time control of these electrons…
Modeling of laser-plasma wakefield accelerators in an optimal frame of reference \cite{VayPRL07} is shown to produce orders of magnitude speed-up of calculations from first principles. Obtaining these speedups requires mitigation of a…
In the laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) a short intense laser pulse, with a duration of the order of a plasma wave period, excites an unusually strong plasma wake wave (laser wakefield). Recent experiments on laser wakefield acceleration…
Injection of well-defined, high-quality electron populations into plasma waves is a key challenge of plasma wakefield accelerators. Here, we report on the first experimental demonstration of plasma density downramp injection in an…
Bright and ultrashort duration X-ray pulses can be produced by through betatron oscillations of electrons during Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA). Our experimental measurements using the \textsc{Hercules} laser system demonstrate a…
We demonstrate a tandem lens optical setup, comprising two diffractive optics, that focuses a high-power ultrafast laser with a shaped on-axis intensity profile, producing a meter-long Bessel focus. The intended use of the optical setup is…
Laser and beam driven wakefields promise orders of magnitude increases in electric field gradients for particle accelerators for future applications. Key areas to explore include the emittance properties of the generated beams and…
We present numerical simulations results on the injection and acceleration of a 10 MeV, 10 pC electrons beam in a plasma wave generated in a gas cell by a 2J, 45 fs laser beam. This modeling is related to the ESCULAP project in which the…
Laser-driven plasma wakefields can provide hundreds of MeV electron beam in mm-range distances potentially shrinking the dimension of the actual particle accelerators. The plasma density plays a fundamental role in the control and stability…
A new electron injection scheme is proposed in sub-relativistic plasma wakefield accelerators. A transverse laser ionizes a dopant gas and ponderomotively accelerates the released electrons in the direction of wake propagation. This process…
Plasma-based accelerators are compact and provide high gradients, yet their practical use has been limited by energy gain, stability, beam quality, and energy transfer efficiency. Here, we address several of these challenges simultaneously…
New acceleration technology is mandatory for the future elucidation of fundamental particles and their interactions. A promising approach is to exploit the properties of plasmas. Past research has focused on creating large-amplitude plasma…
The accelerating gradients in conventional linear accelerators are currently limited to 100 MV per meter. Plasma-based accelerators have the ability to sustain accelerating gradients which are several orders of magnitude greater than that…