Laser wakefield acceleration of electron beams beyond 1 GeV from an ablative capillary discharge waveguide

Lü, Hongfei; Liu, Mingwei; Wang, Wentao; Liu, Jiansheng; Deng, Aihua; Xu, Jiancai; Xia, Changquan; Li, Wentao; Zhang, Hui; Lu, Xiaoming; Wang, Cheng; Wang, Jianzhou; Liang, Xiaoyan; Leng, Yuxin; Shen, Baifei; Nakajima, Kazuhisa; Li, Ruxin; Xu, Zhizhan

doi:10.1063/1.3626042

Cited by 65 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The bubble readily traps initially quiescent background electrons, accelerating them to hundreds of megaelectronvolts (MeV) over a few mm, creating a collimated electron bunch (Pukhov & Meyer-ter-Vehn 2002;Kalmykov et al 2011a). It is in this regime that the first quasi-monoenergetic electrons were produced from laser plasmas in the laboratory (Geddes et al 2004;Mangles et al 2004;Faure et al 2004), and the GeV energy range was approached (Leemans et al 2006;Karsch et al 2007;Hafz et al 2008;Froula et al 2009;Kneip et al 2009;Clayton et al 2010;Lu et al 2011;Liu et al 2011;Pollock et al 2011). …”

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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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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“…Plasma waveguides for guiding ultraintense short laser pulses in plasmas are produced by a number of methods, including laser-induced hydrodynamic expansion [45−47] , pulsed discharges of an ablative capillary [4,5,48,49] or a gas-filled capillary [50,51] . However, the length of such a plasma channel has been limited to less than 10 cm and the plasma density has been created for n 0 10 17 cm −3 .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…driven by ∼1-PW class lasers [3,4,31] , it seems to be far from reaching the high-energy frontier as long as the state-of-the-art on LPAs is simply extrapolated toward such energies. In this context, it is of practical importance to demonstrate the 100-GeV level acceleration in a full scale that is reachable up to the 130 GeV Higgs mass energy as timely drawn attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

100-GeV large scale laser plasma electron acceleration by a multi-PW laser

Nakajima¹,

Lu²,

Zhao³

et al. 2013

中国光学快报

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We present three possible design options of laser plasma acceleration (LPA) for reaching a 100-GeV level energy by means of a multi-petawatt laser such as the 3.5-kJ, 500-fs PETawatt Aquitane Laser (PETAL) at French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Based on scaling of laser wakefield acceleration in the quasi-linear regime with the normalized vector potential a0 = 1.4(1.6), acceleration to 100 (130) GeV requires a 30-m-long plasma waveguide operated at the plasma density ne ≈ 7 × 10 15 cm −3 with a channel depth Δn/ne = 20%, while a nonlinear laser wakefield accelerator in the bubble regime with a0 2 can reach 100 GeV approximately in a 36/a0-m-long plasma through self-guiding. The third option is a hybrid concept that employs a ponderomotive channel created by a long leading pulse for guiding a short trailing driving laser pulse. The detail parameters for three options are evaluated, optimizing the operating plasma density at which a given energy gain is obtained over the dephasing length and the matched conditions for propagation of relativistic laser pulses in plasma channels, including the self-guiding. For the production of high-quality beams with 1%-level energy spread and a 1π-mm-mradlevel transverse normalized emittance at 100-MeV energy, a simple scheme based on the ionization-induced injection mechanism may be conceived. We investigate electron beam dynamics and effects of synchrotron radiation due to betatron motion by solving the beam dynamics equations on energy and beam radius numerically. For the bubble regime case with a0 = 4, radiative energy loss becomes 10% at the maximum energy of 90 GeV.

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“…The present achievements of the laser wakefield accelerator performance on the beam properties such as GeV-class energy Clayton et al, 2010;Lu et al, 2011), 1%-level energy spread (Kameshima et al, 2008;Rechatin et al, 2009), a few mm-mrad emittance (Karsch et al, 2007), 1-fs-level bunch with a 3-4 kA peak current (Lundh et al, 2011), and good stability and controllability (Hafz et al, 2008;Osterhoff et al, 2008) of the beam production allow us to downsize a large-scale X-ray synchrotron radiation source and FEL to a table-top scale including laser drivers and radiation shields. The undulator radiation from laser-plasma accelerated electron beams has been first demonstrated at the wavelength of rad 740 nm   and the estimated peak brilliance of the order of (Fuchs, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%