Sub-cycle dynamics in relativistic nanoplasma acceleration

Cardenas, Daniel; Ostermayr, Tobias; Lucchio, Laura Di; Hofmann, Luisa; Kling, Matthias F.; Gibbon, Paul; Schreiber, Jörg; Veisz, László

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-43635-3

Cited by 26 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…This is to produce electron bunches at higher energy and more separable from the background while keeping a comparable driving laser pulse energy. It has been shown that CEP plays a role in the electron acceleration process in LWFA 28 and in nanoplasma acceleration 29 . Figure 4 demonstrates the generated single bunches using various carrier-envelope phases.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards isolated attosecond electron bunches using ultrashort-pulse laser-solid interactions

Lin

Batson

Nees

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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We investigate MeV-level attosecond electron bunches from ultrashort-pulse laser-solid interactions through similarities between experimental and simulated electron energy spectra. We show measurements of the bunch duration and temporal structure from particle-in-cell simulations. The experimental observation of such bunches favors specular reflection direction when focusing the laser pulse onto a subwavelength boundary of thick overdense plasmas at grazing incidence. Particle-in-cell simulation further reveals that the attosecond duration is a result of ultra-thin ($$\sim $$ ∼ tenth of a micron) gaps of zero electromagnetic energy density in the modulated reflected radiation, while the bunching (locally peaked electron concentration) comes from the highly-directional electron angular distribution acquired by the electrons in a grazing incidence setup. To isolate a single electron bunch, we perform simulations using 1-cycle laser pulses and analyze the effect of carrier-envelop phase with particle tracking. The duration of the electron bunch can be further decreased by increasing the laser intensity and the focal spot size, while its direction can be changed by tuning the preplasma density gradient.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards isolated attosecond electron bunches using ultrashort-pulse laser-solid interactions

Lin

Batson

Nees

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…Numerical computations can therefore be necessary when tight focusing is used to achieve strong fields at a target, and the interaction process is sensitive to the field structure in the focal region. This is the case in many situations, such as vacuum electron acceleration [19,20] and the generation of radiation using laser-driven individual [21] or collective [22][23][24] dynamics of electrons [19][20][21][22][23][24]. Numerical computations can be also crucial when the laser pulse is only few cycles long [25] and, therefore, cannot be treated analytically as monochromatic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tight focusing of few-cycle pulses is an emerging topic with a broad field of applications [43]. Recently, the few-cycle laser technology has reached the state to produce higher energies much beyond the mJ level, which in combination with tight focusing provides strongly relativistic peak intensities [25] for various promising sources of isolated attosecond XUV pulses [23] and relativistic electron bunches [24]. However, this tight focusing is still very challenging [5,28], especially with the almost octave spanning spectrum of few cycle laser pulses, and it will profit from further support by quick numerical algorithms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimized Computation of Tight Focusing of Short Pulses Using Mapping to Periodic Space

et al. 2021

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When a pulsed, few-cycle electromagnetic wave is focused by optics with f-number smaller than two, the frequency components it contains are focused to different regions of space, building up a complex electromagnetic field structure. Accurate numerical computation of this structure is essential for many applications such as the analysis, diagnostics, and control of high-intensity laser-matter interactions. However, straightforward use of finite-difference methods can impose unacceptably high demands on computational resources, owing to the necessity of resolving far-field and near-field zones at sufficiently high resolution to overcome numerical dispersion effects. Here, we present a procedure for fast computation of tight focusing by mapping a spherically curved far-field region to periodic space, where the field can be advanced by a dispersion-free spectral solver. In many cases of interest, the mapping reduces both run time and memory requirements by a factor of order 10, making it possible to carry out simulations on a desktop machine or a single node of a supercomputer. We provide an open-source C++ implementation with Python bindings and demonstrate its use for a desktop machine, where the routine provides the opportunity to use the resolution sufficient for handling the pulses with spectra spanning over several octaves. The described approach can facilitate the stability analysis of theoretical proposals, the studies based on statistical inferences, as well as the overall development and analysis of experiments with tightly-focused short laser pulses.

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“…Then, the energy evolution of the bunch is numerically tracked using PIC simulations in order to determine the peak and cutoff energy values of a typical electron bunch with a finite energy spread. In section III a three-dimensional analytical model is formulated and compared with the particle-tracking analyses of corresponding PIC simulations performed in the context of a recent experiment [16].…”

Section: Introduction: Direct Laser Acceleration Of Electrons In Free Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Post-acceleration of electron bunches from laser-irradiated nanoclusters

Lucchio

Gibbon

2021

Phys. Scr.

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In this paper the energy gain of attosecond electron bunches emitted during the interaction of intense, few-cycle linearly polarized lasers with nanoscale spherical clusters is determined. In this case electron bunches are emitted from the rear side of the cluster and are then further accelerated while co-propagating with the laser. A previous study has shown how this two-stage process readily occurs for clusters whose radii lie between the relativistic skin depth, δ r = γ 1/2 c/ω p , and the laser spot size σ L (Di Lucchio & Gibbon, Phys. Rev. STAB 18, 2015). An analytical model for focused light waves interacting with compact, overdense electron bunches in vacuum is derived heuristically from world-line equations of motion of an electron. The functional integral approach is followed under the mathematical point of view of integration with respect to a stochastic variable. The resulting picture of the laser wave crossing the electron's trajectory leads to a finite energy gain of the electron in light-matter interaction in vacuum. The analytical theory is compared with three-dimensional PIC simulations from which trajectories of the electron bunches can be extracted. The effective increase in bunch energy is determined under realistic conditions both for the peak (mode) and the cutoff energy of the emitted bunch, in order to make quantitative comparisons with theory and the experimental findings of Cardenas et al , Nature Sci. Reports 9 (2019).

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Sub-cycle dynamics in relativistic nanoplasma acceleration

Cited by 26 publications

References 51 publications

Towards isolated attosecond electron bunches using ultrashort-pulse laser-solid interactions

Towards isolated attosecond electron bunches using ultrashort-pulse laser-solid interactions

Optimized Computation of Tight Focusing of Short Pulses Using Mapping to Periodic Space

Post-acceleration of electron bunches from laser-irradiated nanoclusters

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