Excitation and Control of Plasma Wakefields by Multiple Laser Pulses

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally the resonant excitation of plasma waves by trains of laser pulses. We also take an important first step to achieving an energy recovery plasma accelerator by showing that unused wakefield energy can be removed by an out-of-resonance trailing laser pulse. The measured laser wakefields are found to be in excellent agreement with analytical and numerical models of wakefield excitation in the linear regime. Our results indicate a promising direction for achieving highly controlled, GeV-scale laser-plasma accelerators operating at multi-kilohertz repetition rates. This article was published in Physical Review Letters 119, 044802 on 27 July 2017. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.044802 Copyright 2017 American Physical Society.

References in corpus (3)

• All-optical Compton gamma-ray source
• Developments in laser-driven plasma accelerators
• Plasma wakefield excitation by incoherent laser pulses: a path towards high-average power laser-plasma accelerators

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• The REsonant Multi-Pulse Ionization injection
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• Demonstration of kilohertz operation of Hydrodynamic Optical-Field-Ionized Plasma Channels
• Nonlinear plasma wavelength scalings in a laser wakefield accelerator
• Resonant excitation of plasma waves in a plasma channel
• Modulational instability in large-amplitude linear laser wakefields
• Measurement of the decay of laser-driven linear plasma wakefields