Ultrahigh-gradient acceleration of injected electrons by laser-excited relativistic electron plasma waves

Excitation and Control of Plasma Wakefields by Multiple Laser Pulses

“…The MP-LWFA approach is closely related to the plasma beat-wave accelerator (PBWA) [1,33], in which two long laser pulses of angular frequencies ω 1 and ω 2 = ω 1 + ω p0 are combined to form a driving pulse modulated at ω p0 . Beat-wave excitation of plasma waves [34][35][36], and their application to accelerating electrons [37,38], have both been demonstrated.…”

Physics of Phase Space Matching for Staging Plasma and Traditional Accelerator Components Using Longitudinally Tailored Plasma Profiles

“…The first configuration is the so-called injector-accelerator, where a ∼ 100 MeV class electron beam produced by a short, high-density injector stage is further accelerated to ∼ GeV level using a second low-density accelerator stage [11,24,25]. The second example is the external injection scheme where a highquality, relativistic electron bunch is first generated using an RF accelerator and then injected into a PBA [26][27][28][29][30]. The third example concerns the proposed PBA driven light source [31][32][33], where a high-quality electron beam needs to be coupled from the plasma wake to an undulator.…”

Energy Spread Reduction of Electron Beams Produced via Laser Wake

“…However, when LWFA was first proposed the available laser pulse lengths were >3 orders of magnitude too long to drive the wake directly; fortunately, beating of two co-propagating laser pulses with a frequency difference of a plasma frequency (beat-wave LWFA, or BWLWFA) provided a platform for early theoretical and experimental work [5]. The first demonstration of a driven wake in this regime was published in 1985 [6], but it was not until 1993 that electrons were successfully injected into, trapped, and accelerated by the wake [7]. The beat-wave LWFA regime is technically challenging because it requires a two-frequency laser system, and the frequency difference must be exactly matched to the plasma frequency in order to drive the wake.…”