Physics of nanocoulomb-class electron beams in laser-plasma wakefields

Abstract

Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) and its particle-driven counterpart, plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA), are commonly treated as separate, though related branches of high-gradient plasma-based acceleration. However, novel proposed schemes are increasingly residing at the interface of both concepts where the understanding of their interplay becomes crucial. Here, we report on experiments covering a wide range of parameters by using nanocoulomb-class quasi-monoenergetic electron beams from LWFA with a 100-TW-class laser. Based on a controlled electron injection, these beams reach record-level performance in terms of laser-to-beam energy transfer efficiency (up to 10%), spectral charge density (regularly exceeding 10 pC/MeV) and divergence (1 mrad full width at half maximum divergence). The impact of charge fluctuations on the energy spectra of electron bunches is assessed for different laser parameters, including a few-cycle laser, followed by a presentation of results on beam loading in LWFA with two electron bunches. This scenario is particularly promising to provide high-quality electron beams by using one of the bunches to either tailor the laser wakefield via beam loading or to drive its own, beam-dominated wakefield. We present experimental evidence for the latter, showing a varying acceleration of a low-energy witness beam with respect to the charge of a high-energy drive beam in a spatially separate gas target. With the increasing availability of petawatt-class lasers the access to this new regime of laser-plasma wakefield acceleration will be further facilitated, thus providing new paths towards low-emittance beam generation for future plasma-based colliders or light sources.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Stable and high quality electron beams from staged laser and plasma wakefield accelerators
• Linear Breit-Wheeler pair production by high-energy bremsstrahlung photons colliding with an intense X-ray laser pulse
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler pair production in collisions of bremsstrahlung $\gamma -$quanta and a tightly focussed laser pulse
• On the generation of ultra-bright and low energy spread electron beams in laser wakefield acceleration in a uniform plasma
• Leveraging Trust for Joint Multi-Objective and Multi-Fidelity Optimization
• Restoring betatron phase coherence in a beam-loaded laser-wakefield accelerator
• Evolution of equilibrium particle beams under external wakefields
• Generation of arbitrarily polarized muon pairs via polarized $e^{-}{e}^{+}$ collision
• Robustness Optimization for Compact Free-electron Laser Driven by Laser Wakefield Accelerators