High-brilliance betatron gamma-ray source powered by laser-accelerated electrons

Abstract

Recent progress in laser-driven plasma acceleration now enables the acceleration of electrons to several gigaelectronvolts. Taking advantage of these novel accelerators, ultra-short, compact and spatially coherent X-ray sources called betatron radiation have been developed and applied to high-resolution imaging. However, the scope of the betatron sources is limited by a low energy efficiency and a photon energy in the 10's of kiloelectronvolt range, which for example prohibits the use of these sources for probing dense matter. Here, based on three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we propose an original hybrid scheme that combines a low-density laser-driven plasma accelerator with a high-density beam-driven plasma radiator, and thereby considerably increases the photon energy and the radiated energy of the betatron source. The energy efficiency is also greatly improved, with about 1% of the laser energy transferred to the radiation, and the gamma-ray photon energy exceeds the megaelectronvolt range when using a 15 J laser pulse. This high-brilliance hybrid betatron source opens the way to a wide range of applications requiring MeV photons, such as the production of medical isotopes with photo-nuclear reactions, radiography of dense objects in the defense or industrial domains and imaging in nuclear physics.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regime
• Ultra-high brilliance multi-MeV $\gamma$-ray beam from non-linear Thomson scattering
• Quantitative X-Ray Phase-Contrast Microtomography from a Compact Laser Driven Betatron Source
• Implementation of a hybrid particle code with a PIC description in r-z and a gridless description in $\varphi$ into OSIRIS
• GeV electrons due to a transition from laser wakefield acceleration to plasma wakefield acceleration

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Production of Highly Polarized Positron Beams via Helicity Transfer from Polarized Electrons in a Strong Laser Field
• Direct observation of plasma waves and dynamics induced by laser-accelerated electron beams
• Extremely Dense Gamma-Ray Pulses in Electron Beam-Multifoil Collisions
• Probing Ultrafast Magnetic-Field Generation by Current Filamentation Instability in Femtosecond Relativistic Laser-Matter Interactions
• A quasi-static particle-in-cell algorithm based on an azimuthal Fourier decomposition for highly efficient simulations of plasma-based acceleration: QPAD
• Brilliant attosecond γ-ray emission and high-yield positron production from intense laser-irradiated Nano-Micro array
• Enhancement of betatron X-rays through asymmetric laser wakefield generated in transverse density gradients
• Hybrid LWFA $|$ PWFA Staging as a Beam Energy and Brightness Transformer : Conceptual Design and Simulations
• Overcoming the dephasing limit in multiple-pulse laser wakefield acceleration
• Bright synchrotron radiation from relativistic self-trapping of a short laser pulse in near-critical density plasma
• Excitation of strongly nonlinear plasma wakefield by electron bunches
• Attosecond betatron radiation pulse train