Electron self-injection and acceleration driven by a tightly focused intense laser beam in an underdense plasma

Xu, Han; Yu, Wei; Lu, Peixiang; Senecha, V. K.; He, Feng; Shen, Baifei; Qian, Liejia; Li, Ruxin; Xu, Zhizhan

doi:10.1063/1.1827625

Cited by 44 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…21 It has also been understood 26,27 that laser diffraction followed by self-guiding is the most attractive scenario for the formation of a monoenergetic electron beam. As an initially overfocused laser diffracts, the bubble expands, and electrons are injected continuously.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result of this evolution, sheath electrons can penetrate into the bubble near its rear, synchronize with it (i.e., obtain the longitudinal momentum p k % c g m e c) and then travel inside the cavity, continuously gaining energy. 18,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Self-injection eliminates the need for an external injector and, thus, is favorable for the accelerator design. It ties the electron beam quality to the self-consistent nonlinear evolution of the driver.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble: Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration in the blowout regime

et al. 2011

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Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble: Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration in the blowout regime" (2011 An electron density bubble driven in a rarefied uniform plasma by a slowly evolving laser pulse goes through periods of adiabatically slow expansions and contractions. Bubble expansion causes robust self-injection of initially quiescent plasma electrons, whereas stabilization and contraction terminate self-injection thus limiting injected charge; concomitant phase space rotation reduces the bunch energy spread. In regimes relevant to experiments with hundred terawatt-to petawatt-class lasers, bubble dynamics and, hence, the self-injection process are governed primarily by the driver evolution. Collective transverse fields of the trapped electron bunch reduce the accelerating gradient and slow down phase space rotation. Bubble expansion followed by stabilization and contraction suppresses the low-energy background and creates a collimated quasi-monoenergetic electron bunch long before dephasing. Nonlinear evolution of the laser pulse (spot size oscillations, self-compression, and front steepening) can also cause continuous self-injection, resulting in a large dark current, degrading the electron beam quality.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble: Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration in the blowout regime

et al. 2011

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“…Given sufficient computing power, electromagnetic PIC codes can simulate the plasma electrons (and ions, if necessary), the laser pulse driving the plasma wake, and the dynamics of electrons injected into the accelerating potential. In particular, two-and three-dimensional PIC simulations have been essential in understanding the dynamical nature of the electron self-injection process (Xu et al 2005;Oguchi et al 2008;Wu et al 2009;Zhidkov et al 2010;Kalmykov et al 2009Kalmykov et al , 2010Kalmykov et al , 2011a. However, to capture precisely the correlation between driver dynamics, elec-tron self-injection, and GeV-scale acceleration in the bubble regime, a simulation must meet a number of challenging requirements.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computationally efficient methods for modelling laser wakefield acceleration in the blowout regime

Cowan¹,

Kalmykov

Beck

et al. 2012

J. Plasma Phys.

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Electron self-injection and acceleration until dephasing in the blowout regime is studied for a set of initial conditions typical of recent experiments with 100 terawatt-class lasers. Two different approaches to computationally efficient, fully explicit, three-dimensional particle-in-cell modelling are examined. First, the Cartesian code vorpal (Nieter & Cary 2004) using a perfect-dispersion electromagnetic solver precisely describes the laser pulse and bubble dynamics, taking advantage of coarser resolution in the propagation direction, with a proportionally larger time step. Using third-order splines for macroparticles helps suppress the sampling noise while keeping the usage of computational resources modest. The second way to reduce the simulation load is using reduced-geometry codes. In our case, the quasi-cylindrical code calder-circ (Lifschitz et al. 2009) uses decomposition of fields and currents into a set of poloidal modes, while the macroparticles move in the Cartesian 3D space. Cylindrically symmetry of the interaction allow using just two modes, reducing the computational load to roughly that of a planar Cartesian simulation while preserving the 3D nature of the interaction. This significant economy of resources allows using fine resolution in the direction of propagation and a small time step, making numerical dispersion vanishingly small, together with a large number of particles per cell, enabling good particle statistics. Quantitative agreement of the two simulations indicates that they are free of numerical artefacts. Both approaches thus retrieve physically correct evolution of the plasma bubble, recovering the intrinsic connection of electron self-injection to the nonlinear optical evolution of the driver.

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“…A moving window technique is used for realizing the long-time simulation. 37 Figure 1 demonstrates the hole boring process. When the CP laser pulse impinges on the foil surface, the electrons are driven into the foil by the laser ponderomotive force F p .…”

Section: Multistaged Acceleration Of Thin Foilmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-energy monoenergetic protons from multistaged acceleration of thin double-layer target by circularly polarized laser

Zhang

Sheng

et al. 2011

Physics of Plasmas

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Multistaged acceleration of solid-density thin foils by ultraintense circularly polarized laser pulse is investigated. A stable radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) stage is first established. Higher dimensional effects such as transverse instabilities and enhanced electron heating then gradually make the initially opaque foil transparent to the laser light. Accordingly, the dominant acceleration mechanism changes smoothly from RPA to target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA). The transition can therefore enhance the maximum energy of the accelerated ions but broaden their energy spectrum. For a double-layer target, however, the light ions (protons) in the backlayer can be efficiently accelerated in the RPA and TNSA regimes nearly monoenergetically. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that with this scheme a circularly polarized laser pulse of peak intensity 3.9×1022 W/cm2 can produce a collimated proton bunch that persists for many Rayleigh lengths and its peak energy can reach 4.2 GeV with FWHM of 200 MeV.

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Electron self-injection and acceleration driven by a tightly focused intense laser beam in an underdense plasma

Cited by 44 publications

References 21 publications

Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble: Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration in the blowout regime

Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble: Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration in the blowout regime

Computationally efficient methods for modelling laser wakefield acceleration in the blowout regime

High-energy monoenergetic protons from multistaged acceleration of thin double-layer target by circularly polarized laser

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