Tunable synchrotron-like radiation from centimeter scale plasma channels

Abstract

Synchrotron radiation (SR) sources are immensely useful tools for scientific researches and many practical applications. Currently, the state-of-the-art synchrotrons rely on conventional accelerators, where electrons are accelerated in a straight line and radiate in bending magnets or other insertion devices. However, these facilities are usually large and costly. Here, we study a compact all optical synchrotron-like radiation source based on laser-plasma acceleration either in a straight or a curved plasma channel. With the laser pulse off-axially injected, its centroid oscillates transversely in the plasma channel. This results in a wiggler motion of the whole accelerating structure and the self-trapped electrons behind the laser pulse, leading to strong synchrotron-like radiations with tunable spectra. It is further shown that a palmtop ring-shaped synchrotron is possible with current high power laser technologies. With its potential of high flexibility and tunability, such light sources once realized would find applications in wide areas and make up the shortage of large SR facilities.

Ionization Induced Electron Injection in Laser Wakefield Acceleration

“…At the same time, the high energy photon radio therapy such as X rays or γ rays can also benefit by the ionization injection scheme. Electrons with high quality can radiate X rays through betatron oscillation [4], plasma channel guided oscillation [34] or Bremstrahlung radiation. For this purpose more work of improving the yield and quality of the radiations should be done.…”

Enhanced betatron radiation by steering a laser-driven plasma wakefield with a tilted shock front

“…24 Then, the electrons undergoing the transverse focusing of the wakefield and bending 36,37 at the boundaries would be steered from its initial propagation. Finally, the e beam generated before the TSF would obtain a much larger transverse oscillation amplitude in the plasma wiggler, where the e-beam energy would not change much if the e beam was located close to the zero-phase region of the wakefield where the accelerating field was zero.…”

“…Some ideas of manipulating r b to enhance betatron radiation have been demonstrated; [18][19][20][21][22] however, the produced x-rays had continuum spectra because the controllability was at the cost of sacrificing the e-beam quality. Recently, an idea of a helical plasma undulator has been proposed to produce controllable synchrotron-like radiation by inducing centroid oscillations of the laser pulse 23,24 in a plasma channel. Furthermore, some methods have also been proposed to obtain bright betatron x-rays by applying an external ultra-intense magnetic field 25,26 in the wakefield but have not been demonstrated experimentally so far.…”

High quality electron beam acceleration by ionization injection in laser wakefields with mid-infrared dual-color lasers

“…This is because the main pulse at longer wavelength and a relatively low plasma density are used in our scheme, thus with a limited power the laser pulse can have much larger waist, which can drive a larger wake structure to load a higher electron beam charge with a good quality. Our scheme is very helpful for the applications requiring high charge and low energy spread [38][39][40] .…”