Physics of fully-loaded laser-plasma accelerators

Guillaume, E.; Döpp, A.; Thaury, C.; Lifschitz, Agustín; Goddet, Jean-Philippe; Tafzi, Amar; Sylla, F.; Iaquanello, G.; Lefrou, T.; Rousseau, P.; Phuoc, K. Ta; Malka, Victor

doi:10.1103/physrevstab.18.061301

Cited by 28 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(23 reference statements)

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“…When the electric charge of the accelerated electrons is high enough to produce an electric field of the order of the electric field inside the cavity, in an uncontrollable regime the quality of the accelerated electron bunch deteriorates, although when the bunch is carefully shaped, the total electric field can be made constant over the bunch length, which minimizes the energy spread (Wilks et al 1987;Tzoufras et al 2008). The problem of beam loading has been addressed experimentally and theoretically in a number of works, e. g. see Rechatin et al (2009a), Guillaume et al (2015a) and the review article Esarey et al (2009) and references therein. The beam overloading constraint imposes an upper limit on the number of accelerated particles.…”

Section: Electron Beam Dynamics Inside the Cavitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On some theoretical problems of laser wake-field accelerators

et al. 2016

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Enhancement of the quality of laser wake-field accelerated (LWFA) electron beams implies the improvement and controllability of the properties of the wake waves generated by ultra-short pulse lasers in underdense plasmas. In this work we present a compendium of useful formulas giving relations between the laser and plasma target parameters allowing one to obtain basic dependences, e.g. the energy scaling of the electrons accelerated by the wake field excited in inhomogeneous media including multi-stage LWFA accelerators. Consideration of the effects of using the chirped laser pulse driver allows us to find the regimes where the chirp enhances the wake field amplitude. We present an analysis of the three-dimensional effects on the electron beam loading and on the unlimited LWFA acceleration in inhomogeneous plasmas. Using the conditions of electron trapping to the wake-field acceleration phase we analyse the multi-equal stage and multiuneven stage LWFA configurations. In the first configuration the energy of fast electrons is a linear function of the number of stages, and in the second case, the accelerated electron energy grows exponentially with the number of stages. The results of the two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations presented here show the high quality electron acceleration in the triple stage injection-acceleration configuration.

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Section: Electron Beam Dynamics Inside the Cavitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On some theoretical problems of laser wake-field accelerators

et al. 2016

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“…As expected from the above simulation and discussion, the positively chirped pulse generates the largest wakefield, and the negatively chirped pulse generates the smallest wakefield. Larger wake amplitudes of the positively chirped pulse are advantageous to electron self‐injection in LWFA; hence, the positively chirped pulse is anticipated to enhance the total charge, which is quite useful in the fields of radiobiology, radiotherapy, or industrial radiography based on the secondary radiation source from the laser‐plasma accelerators, that the highly charged beams are required …”

Section: Simulation Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation of a chirped femtosecond relativistic laser pulse interaction with underdense plasma by using a hydrodynamic approach

Zhu

et al. 2019

Contributions to Plasma Physics

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A chirped laser pulse indicates that the laser frequency changes over the duration of the pulse: a positively (negatively) chirped pulse implies that the laser frequency increases (decreases) with time. In this paper, we use a simplified, fully relativistic hydrodynamic approach to simulate the influence of chirp on the propagation of a femtosecond relativistic laser pulse in underdense plasma. Based on this simplified cold-fluid model, the influence of chirp on the main dynamics of the laser pulse, such as self-steepening, red-shift in the leading edge, variation of the frequency chirp, and the generated wakefields can be studied self-consistently. The simulation results show that a pulse with a positive chirp results in a larger increment in the intensity parameter a 0 when propagating a certain distance into an underdense plasma compared with an un-chirped and a negatively chirped pulse, which is largely because of a much greater forward shift of the peak amplitude and more severe pulse self-steepening effect due to the frequency red-shift at the leading edge when exciting a plasma wave. The ponderomotive force, which relates to the first-order differential of the laser pulse intensity envelope, is expected to be stronger for a positively chirped pulse because of its steeper leading edge and larger intensity parameter a 0 .As a result, the wakefield driven by the positively chirped laser pulse is more intense than that driven by an un-chirped and a negatively chirped laser pulse, which is confirmed by our self-consistent hydrodynamic simulation. K E Y W O R D Schirp, femtosecond relativistic laser, plasma, wakefield INTRODUCTIONUsing the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique, ultrashort-pulse laser sources with durations on the femtosecond time scale can produce multi-terawatt and even petawatt power. [1][2][3] These laser pulses can be focused to intensities well above 10 18 W/cm 2 , [4] from which an electron will acquire a quiver velocity approaching the speed of light; that is, the electron motion in the laser fields becomes highly relativistic and non-linear. Thus, these laser pulses are called relativistic femtosecond laser pulses and have great applications in high energy density science, such as energetic electron acceleration, [5] ion acceleration, [6] attosecond pulses generation, [7,8] positron beams for laboratory astrophysics, [9] and so on. These applications require long laser

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“…In the next section we will discuss the performance of the accelerator in this configuration. More details on electron acceleration in this regime have been published elsewhere [33].…”

Section: Ionization-induced Injectionmentioning

confidence: 99%