Generation of attosecond electron bunches and X-ray pulses from few-cycle femtosecond laser pulses

Abstract

Laser-plasma electron accelerators can be used to produce high-intensity X-rays, as electrons accelerated in wakefields emit radiation due to betatron oscillations.Such X-ray sources inherit the features of the electron beam; sub-femtosecond electron bunches produce betatron sources of the same duration, which in turn allow probing matter on ultrashort time scales. In this paper we show, via Particle-in-Cell simulations, that attosecond electron bunches can be obtained using low-energy, ultra-short laser beams both in the self-injection and the controlled injection regimes at low plasma densities. However, only in the controlled regime does the electron injection lead to a stable, isolated attosecond electron bunch. Such ultrashort electron bunches are shown to emit attosecond X-ray bursts with high brilliance

arXiv comment12 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regime
• Femtosecond x rays from laser-plasma accelerators
• Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses
• Single shot phase contrast imaging using laser-produced Betatron x-ray beams
• Demonstration of the synchrotron-type spectrum of laser-produced Betatron radiation
• Relativistic near-single-cycle optics at 1 kHz
• Energy-chirp compensation in laser wakefield accelerators
• Hard X-rays from laser-wakefield accelerators in density tailored plasmas
• Enhanced betatron radiation by steering a low-energy-spread electron beam in a deflected laser-driven plasma wiggler
• Relativistically intense XUV radiation from laser-illuminated near-critical plasmas