Low Energy Spread Attosecond Bunching and Coherent Electron Acceleration in Dielectric Nanostructures

Abstract

We demonstrate a compact technique to compress electron pulses to attosecond length, while keeping the energy spread reasonably small. The technique is based on Dielectric Laser Acceleration (DLA) in nanophotonic silicon structures. Unlike previous ballistic optical microbunching demonstrations, we use a modulator-demodulator scheme to compress phase space in the time and energy coordinates. With a second stage, we show that these pulses can be coherently accelerated, producing a net energy gain of $1.5\pm 0.1$ keV, which is significantly larger than the remaining energy spread of $0.88{}_{-0.2}^{+0.0}$ keV FWHM. We show that by linearly sweeping the phase between the two stages, the energy spectrum can be coherently moved in a periodic manner, while keeping the energy spread roughly constant. After leaving the buncher, the electron pulse is also transversely focused, and can be matched into a following accelerator lattice. Thus, this setup is the prototype injector into a scalable DLA based on Alternating Phase Focusing (APF).

References in corpus (12)

• Ultrafast transmission electron microscopy using a laser-driven field emitter: femtosecond resolution with a high coherence electron beam
• Dielectric Laser Acceleration
• On-chip integrated laser-driven particle accelerator
• From attosecond to zeptosecond coherent control of free-electron wave functions using semi-infinite light fields
• Highly coherent electron beam from a laser-triggered tungsten needle tip
• Generation and Characterization of Attosecond Micro-Bunched Electron Pulse Trains via Dielectric Laser Acceleration
• Alternating Phase Focusing for Dielectric Laser Acceleration
• Dielectric-laser electron acceleration in a dual pillar grating with a distributed Bragg reflector
• Beam Dynamics Analysis of Dielectric Laser Acceleration using a Fast 6D Tracking Scheme
• Threedimensional Alternating-Phase Focusing for Dielectric-Laser Electron Accelerators
• Femtosecond laser-induced electron emission from nanodiamond-coated tungsten needle tips
• Analytical energy spectra and wake effects for relativistic dielectric laser accelerators

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Observation of enhanced free-electron radiation from photonic flatband resonances
• Electron phase space control in photonic chip-based particle acceleration
• Considerations for a TeV Collider Based On Dielectric Laser Accelerators
• Beam Dynamics in Dielectric Laser Acceleration
• Scattering-asymmetry control with ultrafast electron wave packet shaping