Direct laser acceleration in underdense plasmas with multi-PW lasers: a path to high-charge, GeV-class electron bunches

Abstract

The direct laser acceleration (DLA) of electrons in underdense plasmas can provide 100s of nC of electrons accelerated to near-GeV energies using currently available lasers. Here we demonstrate the key role of electron transverse displacement in the acceleration and use it to analytically predict the expected maximum electron energies. The energy scaling is shown to be in agreement with full-scale quasi-3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of a laser pulse propagating through a preformed guiding channel and can be directly used for optimizing DLA in near-future laser facilities. The strategy towards optimizing DLA through matched laser focusing is presented for a wide range of plasma densities paired with current and near-future laser technology. Electron energies in excess of 10 GeV are accessible for lasers at $I\sim 10^{21}W/c{\mathrm{m}}^2$.

Accepted for publication in PRL

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Direct laser acceleration: A model for the electron injection from the walls of a cylindrical guiding structure
• Direct laser acceleration in varying plasma density profiles
• Bayesian optimization of electron energy from laser wakefield accelerators
• Ambient air plasma acceleration in tightly-focused ultrashort infrared laser beams