Tunable, all-optical quasi-monochromatic Thomson X-ray source
Abstract
Brilliant X-ray sources are of great interest for many research fields from biology via medicine to material research. The quest for a cost-effective, brilliant source with unprecedented temporal resolution has led to the recent realization of various high-intensity-laser-driven X-ray beam sources. Here we demonstrate the first all-laser-driven, energy-tunable and quasi-monochromatic X-ray source based on Thomson backscattering. This is a decisive step beyond previous results, where the emitted radiation exhibited an uncontrolled broad energy distribution. In the experiment, one part of the laser beam was used to drive a few-fs bunch of quasi-monoenergetic electrons from a Laser-Wakefield Accelerator (LWFA), while the remainder was scattered off the bunch in a near-counter-propagating geometry. When the electron energy was tuned from 10-50 MeV, narrow-bandwidth X-ray spectra peaking at 5-35keV were directly measured, limited in photon energy by the sensitivity curve of our X-ray detector. Due to the ultrashort LWFA electron bunches, these beams exhibit few-fs pulse duration.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1406.6654,
title = {Tunable, all-optical quasi-monochromatic Thomson X-ray source},
author = {K. Khrennikov and J. Wenz and A. Buck and J. Xu and M. Heigoldt and L. Veisz and S. Karsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.6654},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
Submitted to Nature Photonics on 12.09.2013