Generation of 100-MeV Attosecond Electron Bunches with Terawatt Few-Cycle Laser Pulses

Abstract

Laser-wakefield acceleration has been demonstrated to be a promising technique for compact electron accelerators. However, it is still challenging to achieve high-quality 100-MeV electron bunches of sub-femtosecond duration with current techniques. Here, we present and numerically demonstrate an efficient scheme to produce such high-energy tunable ultrashort electron bunches, which is achieved by the use of a nonlinear wakefield driven by a terawatt few-cycle laser pulse in a new structure of plasma channel. With the driving laser pulse energy of 25mJ only, the resulting electron bunch can reach 101 MeV with 7.8 pC charge, ~4 mrad divergence, ~3% energy spread, energy efficiency above 3%, and a duration of hundreds of attoseconds. As such laser pulses may be obtained with a kilohertz repetition rate and high stability, our scheme could be interesting for ultrafast science and accelerator community.

Effect of sharp vacuum–plasma boundary on the electron injection and acceleration in a few-cycle laser driven wakefield

“…Recently, many works have been reported to investigate the LWFA driven by the few-cycle laser pulses, and the electron beams with pulse width of femtosecond or attosecond and energy of tens of MeV can be obtained. [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Effective electron injection schemes are required for applications of electron beam. Multiple electron injection methods have been developed, such as self-injection, [28] density gradient injection [29,30] and ionization injection, [31,32] and other mechanisms.…”

Effect of nozzle curvature on supersonic gas jets used in laser–plasma acceleration

“…Laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) is a particle acceleration scheme that uses an ultrafast intense laser pulse to create a plasma wave that can sustain strong acceleration gradients of hundreds of GV/m to achieve electron acceleration over short distances. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Such accelerators have become capable of producing relativistic quasi-monoenergetic electron beams [10][11][12][13] in the hundreds of MeV [14][15][16][17][18][19] to above GeV energy level. [20][21][22][23][24][25] Controlled LPA experiments require a well-defined interaction region between the laser pulse and the plasma target.…”

Generation of single-cycle relativistic infrared pulses at wavelengths above 20 µm from density-tailored plasmas

“…4 They are also of particular interest for ultrafast molecular dynamics imaging, 5 IR spectroscopy 6 for biological and medical diagnostics, molecular fingerprinting, and the generation of optical frequency combs. 7,8 The boosting of such IR light sources to relativistic intensity will open up a new realm of research, dealing, for instance, with the generation of bright hard x-ray or even gamma-ray sources, 9 next-generation laser-plasma accelerators, [10][11][12] and the study of relativistic light-matter interactions in the mid-IR domain. 13 Most of these studies would benefit significantly from intense driving optical fields with ultrashort pulse durations of a few cycles, long carrier wavelength, multi-millijoule (multi-mJ) pulse energy, and high peak intensity reaching up to the relativistic level.…”