Recent studies on single-shot diagnostics for plasma accelerators at SPARC_LAB

Abstract

Plasma wakefield acceleration is the most promising acceleration technique for compact and cheap accelerators, thanks to the high accelerating gradients achievable. Nevertheless, this approach still suffers of shot-to-shot instabilities, mostly related to experimental parameters fluctuations. Therefore, the use of single shot diagnostics is needed to properly understand the acceleration mechanism. In this work, we present two diagnostics to probe electron beams from laser-plasma interactions, one relying on Electro Optical Sampling (EOS) for laser-solid matter interactions, the other one based on Optical Transition Radiation (OTR) for single shot measurements of the transverse emittance of plasma accelerated electron beams, both developed at the SPARC LAB Test Facility.

Simultaneous observation of ultrafast electron and proton beams in TNSA

“…At the SPARC LAB Test Facility [11] , ultrafast electrooptic sampling (EOS) diagnostics [12,13] have been installed in the FLAME laser [14] target area. This allows us to perform temporally resolved measurements on fast electrons with about 100 fs resolution [15,16] .…”