Ultrarelativistic electron beams accelerated by terawatt scalable kHz laser

Abstract

We show the laser-driven acceleration of unprecedented, collimated ($2\mathrm{mrad}$ divergence), and quasi-monoenergetic ($25\%$ energy spread) electron beams with energy up to $50\mathrm{MeV}$ at $1\mathrm{kHz}$ repetition rate. The laser driver is a multi-cycle ($15\mathrm{fs}$) $1\mathrm{kHz}$ optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) system, operating at $26\mathrm{mJ}$ ($1.7\mathrm{TW}$). The scalability of the driver laser technology and the electron beams reported in this work pave the way towards developing high-brilliance x-ray sources for medical imaging, innovative devices for brain cancer treatment, and represent a step towards the realization of a kHz GeV electron beamline.

arXiv comment6 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (6)

• Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses
• Multi-MeV electron acceleration by sub-terawatt laser pulses
• Demonstration of a compact plasma accelerator powered by laser-accelerated electron beams
• High-charge relativistic electron bunches from a kHz laser-plasma accelerator
• Stable and high quality electron beams from staged laser and plasma wakefield accelerators
• Dosimetric characterisation and application to radiation biology of a kHz laser-driven electron beam

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Bayesian optimization of electron energy from laser wakefield accelerators
• Visualization of high-intensity laser-matter interactions in virtual reality and web browser
• Performance envelope of laser wakefield accelerators
• Optimized matching conditions for self-guided laser wakefield accelerators
• Bright coherent attosecond X-ray pulses from beam-driven relativistic mirrors