High quality beam produced by tightly focused laser driven wakefield accelerators

Abstract

We propose to use tightly focused lasers to generate high quality electron beams in laser wakefield accelerators. In this scheme, the expansion of the laser beam after the focal position enlarges the size of wakefield bubble, which reduces the effective phase velocity of the wake and triggers injection of plasma electrons. This scheme injects a relatively long beam with high charge. The energy spread of the injected beam can be minimized if an optimal acceleration distance is chosen so that the beam chirp is suppressed. Particle-in-cell simulations indicate that electron beams with the charge in the order of nanocoulomb, the energy spread of $\sim 1\%$, and the normalized emittance of $\sim 0.1\mathrm{mm}\cdot \mathrm{mrad}$ can be generated in uniform plasma using $\sim 100\mathrm{TW}$ laser pulses. An empirical formula is also given for predicting the beam charge. This injection scheme, with a very simple setup, paves the way towards practical high-quality laser wakefield accelerators for table-top electron and radiation sources.

arXiv comment7 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regime
• Enhancement of electron energy to multi-GeV regime by a dual-stage laser-wakefield accelerator pumped by petawatt laser pulses
• A spectral, quasi-cylindrical and dispersion-free Particle-In-Cell algorithm
• Multi-chromatic narrow-energy-spread electron bunches from laser wakefield acceleration with dual-color lasers
• Self-truncated ionization injection and consequent monoenergetic electron bunches in laser wakefield acceleration
• Plasma lenses for ultrashort multi-petawatt laser pulses
• Injection induced by coaxial laser interference in laser wakefield accelerators
• Plasma Lenses for Relativistic Laser Beams in Laser Wakefield Accelerators
• Ponderomotive Injection in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Scissor-cross ionization injection in laser wakefield accelerators

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Leaky surface plasmon-based wakefield acceleration in nanostructured carbon nanotubes
• On-chip high energy photon radiation source based on microwave-dielectric undulator