Guiding of relativistically intense laser pulses with peak power of 0.85 PW over 15 diffraction lengths was demonstrated by increasing the focusing strength of a capillary discharge waveguide using laser inverse Bremsstrahlung heating. This allowed for the production of electron beams with quasi-monoenergetic peaks up to 7.8 GeV, double the energy that was previously demonstrated. Charge was 5 pC at 7.8 GeV and up to 62 pC in 6 GeV peaks, and typical beam divergence was 0.2 mrad.

Density transition injection is an effective technique for controllably loading electrons into a trapped phase for laser plasma accelerators. One common technique to achieve the required fluid structure is to impinge a thin blade on the plume of a supersonic nozzle. Density transitions induced in this way are often assumed to be bow shocks and therefore sharp, but two-dimensional simulations and fluorescence measurements presented in this work show that in many cases of interest the density transition accessible to a laser propagating transverse to the shock is an intercepting shock, and therefore shock thickness and density vary with pressure, laser height and blade position. The fluid dynamics of a supersonic nozzle impinged on by a thin, flat object are explored through simulations and relevant features verified via planar laser-induced fluorescence measurements. Implications of results for tuning electron beam injectors in laser plasma accelerators are discussed.

Supersonic gas jets produced by converging-diverging nozzles are commonly used as targets for laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) experiments. A major point of interest for these targets is the gas density at the region of interaction where the laser ionizes the gas plume to create a plasma, providing the acceleration structure. Tuning the density profiles at this interaction region is crucial to LPA optimization. A "flat-top" density profile is desired at the line of interaction to control laser propagation and high-energy electron acceleration, while a short high-density profile is often preferred for acceleration of lower-energy tightly focused laser-plasma interactions. A particular design parameter of interest is the curvature of the nozzle's diverging section. We examine three nozzle designs with different curvatures: the concave "bell," straight conical, and convex "trumpet" nozzles. We demonstrate that for mm-scale axisymmetric nozzles that, at mm-scale distances from the nozzle exit, curvature significantly impacts shock formation and the resulting gas jet density field and, therefore, is an essential parameter in LPA gas jet design. We show that bell nozzles are able to produce focused regions of gas with higher densities. We find that the trumpet nozzle, similar to straight and bell nozzles, can produce flat-top profiles if optimized correctly and can produce flatter profiles at the cost of slightly wider edges. An optimization procedure for the trumpet nozzle is derived and compared to the straight nozzle optimization process. We present results for different nozzle designs from computational fluid dynamics simulations performed with the program ANSYS Fluent and verify them experimentally using neutral density interferometry.

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