Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses

Abstract

Laser-plasma acceleration is an emerging technique for accelerating electrons to high energies over very short distances. The accelerated electron bunches have femtosecond duration, making them particularly relevant for applications such as ultrafast imaging or femtosecond X-ray generation. Current laser-plasma accelerators are typically driven by Joule-class laser systems that have two main drawbacks: their relatively large scale and their low repetition-rate, with a few shots per second at best. The accelerated electron beams have energies ranging from 100 MeV to multi-GeV, however a MeV electron source would be more suited to many societal and scientific applications. Here, we demonstrate a compact and reliable laser-plasma accelerator producing high-quality few-MeV electron beams at kilohertz repetition rate. This breakthrough was made possible by using near-single-cycle light pulses, which lowered the required laser energy for driving the accelerator by three orders of magnitude, thus enabling high repetition-rate operation and dramatic downsizing of the laser system. The measured electron bunches are collimated, with an energy distribution that peaks at 5 MeV and contains up to 1 pC of charge. Numerical simulations reproduce all experimental features and indicate that the electron bunches are only $\sim 1$ fs long. We anticipate that the advent of these kHz femtosecond relativistic electron sources will pave the way to wide-impact applications, such as ultrafast electron diffraction in materials with an unprecedented sub-10 fs resolution.

References in corpus (8)

• Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regime
• Femtosecond x rays from laser-plasma accelerators
• All-optical Compton gamma-ray source
• Compression of CEP-stable multi-mJ laser pulses down to 4 fs in long hollow fibers
• Multi-MeV electron acceleration by sub-terawatt laser pulses
• High Repetition-Rate Wakefield Electron Source Generated by Few-millijoule, 30 femtosecond Laser Pulses on a Density Downramp
• Concept of a laser-plasma based electron source for sub-10 fs electron diffraction
• Carrier-envelope-phase stable, high-contrast, double chirped-pulse-amplification laser system

Cited by in corpus (42)

• Segmented Terahertz Electron Accelerator and Manipulator (STEAM)
• Acceleration of relativistic beams using laser-generated terahertz pulses
• Multipass cell for high-power few-cycle compression
• Relativistic near-single-cycle optics at 1 kHz
• Physics of nanocoulomb-class electron beams in laser-plasma wakefields
• Optical guiding in meter-scale plasma waveguides
• 2022 Review of Data-Driven Plasma Science
• Relativistic, single-cycle tunable-infrared pulses generated by a tailored plasma density structure
• Attosecond Control of Electron Beams at Dielectric and Absorbing Membranes
• Laser-Induced Linear Electron Acceleration in Free Space
• High-charge relativistic electron bunches from a kHz laser-plasma accelerator
• Demonstration of stable long-term operation of a kilohertz laser-plasma accelerator
• Single-cycle optical control of beam electrons
• Laser-accelerated, low divergence 15 MeV quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches at 1 kHz
• Generation of above-TW 1.5-cycle visible pulses at 1 kHz by post-compression in a hollow fiber
• Relativistic acceleration of electrons injected by a plasma mirror into a radially polarized laser beam
• Universal route to optimal few- to single-cycle pulse generation in hollow-core fiber compressors
• Characterizing ultrashort laser pulses with second harmonic dispersion scans
• A quasi-static particle-in-cell algorithm based on an azimuthal Fourier decomposition for highly efficient simulations of plasma-based acceleration: QPAD
• Interaction of ultraintense radially-polarized laser pulses with plasma mirrors
• Spatially homogeneous few-cycle compression of Yb lasers via all-solid-state free-space soliton management
• Ultrarelativistic electron beams accelerated by terawatt scalable kHz laser
• Carrier-envelope phase effects in Laser Wakefield Acceleration with near-single-cycle pulses
• Inline self-diffraction dispersion-scan of over octave-spanning pulses in the single-cycle regime
• Optimization and stabilization of a kilohertz laser-plasma accelerator
• Generation of attosecond electron bunches and X-ray pulses from few-cycle femtosecond laser pulses
• Dosimetric characterisation and application to radiation biology of a kHz laser-driven electron beam
• Generation of XUV spectral continua from relativistic plasma mirrors driven in the near-single-cycle limit
• Overcoming the dephasing limit in multiple-pulse laser wakefield acceleration
• Research towards high-repetition rate laser-driven X-ray sources for imaging applications
• Ultra-short, MeV-scale laser-plasma positron source for positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy
• Beyond optimization -- supervised learning applications in relativistic laser-plasma experiments
• A route to high peak power and energy scaling in the mid-IR chirped-pulse oscillator-amplifier laser systems
• Time Resolved Investigation of High Repetition Rate Gas Jet Target For High Harmonic Generation
• Laser wakefield acceleration with high-power, few-cycle mid-IR lasers
• Carrier-envelope phase controlled dynamics of relativistic electron beams in a laser-wakefield accelerator
• Electron self-injection threshold for the tandem-pulse laser wakefield accelerator
• Energy Scalability Limits of Dissipative Solitons
• Wakefield Excited by Ultrashort Laser Pulses in Near-Critical Density Plasmas
• GeV-scale accelerators driven by plasma-modulated pulses from kilohertz lasers
• Liquid-cooled modular gas cell system for high-order harmonic generation using high average power laser systems
• Scaling Laws in Plasma Channels for Laser Wakefield Accelerators