Design of a THz-driven compact relativistic electron source

Abstract

A THz-pulse-driven compact, < 150 mm in total length, two-stage electron accelerator setup was designed. It uses 2 × 2 pairs of nearly counter-propagating focused THz pulses. The effects of the initial bunch charge and the propagation direction of the THz pulses on the energy of the accelerated electrons were investigated by numerical simulations. Generation of 8 fC electron bunches with up to 340 keV energy; only 2.0% energy spread and compressed on-target duration of 200 fs is predicted using single-cycle low-frequency THz pulses with less than 4.5 mJ total energy.

Performance comparison of lithium-niobate-based extremely high-field single-cycle terahertz sources [Invited]

“…Many possible applications of THz pulses have been proposed [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and demonstrated [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] , which need the application of THz pulses with significantly above 1 MV/cm peak electric field strength or would strongly benefit from it. These applications include enhancement of both the high-harmonic generation efficiency [5] and the cut-off frequency [6] , orientation of molecules [12,13] , electron [9,10,15,19] and proton [8] acceleration or other manipulation [7,17,18] , and generation of very special carrier-envelope stable attosecond pulses [11] . In addition to the above indicated megavolts (MV)/cm range of electric field, some of the previously mentioned applications also require well controllable single-or few-cycle THz pulses.…”

“…In addition to the above indicated megavolts (MV)/cm range of electric field, some of the previously mentioned applications also require well controllable single-or few-cycle THz pulses. For example, (i) alignment and orientation of molecules [12,13] and (ii) efficient particle acceleration and manipulation [9,10,14] are types of such applications. (i) The degree of both field-free orientation and alignment induced by single-cycle THz pulses with μJ energies in an OCS gas sample was calculated and demonstrated in Refs.…”