Spontaneous emergence of non-planar electron orbits during direct laser acceleration by a linearly polarized laser pulse

Abstract

An electron irradiated by a linearly polarized relativistic intensity laser pulse in a cylindrical plasma channel can gain significant energy from the pulse. The laser electric and magnetic fields drive electron oscillations in a plane making it natural to expect the electron trajectory to be flat. We show that strong modulations of the relativistic $\gamma$-factor associated with the energy enhancement cause the free oscillations perpendicular to the plane of the driven motion to become unstable. As a consequence, out of plane displacements grow to become comparable to the amplitude of the driven oscillations and the electron trajectory becomes essentially three-dimensional, even if at an early stage of the acceleration it was flat. The development of the instability profoundly affects the x-ray emission, causing considerable divergence of the radiation perpendicular to the plane of the driven oscillations, while also reducing the overall emitted energy.

References in corpus (4)

• Synergistic Laser Wakefield/Direct Laser Acceleration in the Plasma Bubble Regime
• Novel Aspects of Direct Laser Acceleration of Relativistic Electrons
• Enhancement of laser-driven electron acceleration in an ion channel
• On The Origin of Super-Hot Electrons from Intense Laser Interactions with Solid Targets having Moderate Scale Length Preformed Plasmas

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Beyond the ponderomotive limit: direct laser acceleration of relativistic electrons in sub-critical plasmas
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• Direct laser acceleration in underdense plasmas with multi-PW lasers: a path to high-charge, GeV-class electron bunches
• Scaling laws for direct laser acceleration in a radiation-reaction dominated regime
• Direct laser acceleration of electrons by tightly focused laser pulses
• Direct laser acceleration in varying plasma density profiles
• Extreme Nonlinear Dynamics in Vacuum Laser Acceleration with a Crossed Beam Configuration