We analyze $μ^+μ^-$ pair production generated by high-energy electrons emerging from a laser-wakefield accelerator. The $μ^+μ^-$ pairs are created in a solid thick high-$Z$ target, following the electron accelerating plasma region. Numerical estimates are presented for electron beams obtained presently in the LBL TW laser experiment \cite{C2} and possible future developments. Reactions induced by the secondary bremsstrahlung photons dominate the dimuon production. According to our estimates, a 20 pC electron bunch with energy of 1 (10) GeV may create about 200 (6000) muon pairs. The produced $μ^\pm$ can be used in studying various aspects of muon-related physics in table top installations. This may be considered as an important step towards the investigation of more complicated elementary processes induced by laser driven electrons.
A brightness of a betatron radiation generated by laser wakefield accelerated electrons can be increased by utilizing the laser driver with shorter duration at the same energy. Such shortening is possible by pulse compression after its nonlinear self-phase modulation in thin plate. However, this method can lead to a rather complex femtosecond-scale time structure of the pulse. In this work, the results of numerical simulations show that the presence of a pedestal or prepulses containing few percents or more of the main pulse energy can inhibit the acceleration process and lead to lower energie…
Next-generation plasma-based accelerators can push electron beams to GeV energies within centimetre distances. The plasma, excited by a driver pulse, is indeed able to sustain huge electric fields that can efficiently accelerate a trailing witness bunch, which was experimentally demonstrated on multiple occasions. Thus, the main focus of the current research is being shifted towards achieving a high quality of the beam after the plasma acceleration. In this letter we present beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment, where initially preformed high-quality witness beam was accelerate…
Direct observation of plasma waves and dynamics induced by laser-accelerated electron beams
等离子体尾波场加速技术是一种新型的加速技术，在粒子对撞机和光源领域都有很好的应用前景。然而，迄今为止，PWFA的研究仅限于全球少数大型加速器设施。在这里，我们提出的第一个结果，等离子体尾场产生使用电子束加速与100 TW级钛：萨激光。由于它们的超短持续时间和高电荷密度，激光加速电子聚束适合于驱动电子密度在$10^{19}$ cm $^{-3}$数量级的等离子体波。我们捕获的光束诱导的等离子体动力学与飞秒分辨率使用几个周期的光学探测，除了等离子体波本身，我们观察到一个独特的横向离子运动在其踪迹。这种以前未观察到的现象可以解释为作用在离子上的等离子体波的有质动力，导致在许多皮秒内等离子体密度的调制。由于等离子体尾流场产生的标度律，在高等离子体密度下使用强流激光加速电子束获得的结果可以容易地标度到低密度系统。因此，激光驱动的PWFA实验可以作为其更大的传统同行的微型模型。此外，我们的研究结果为新一代激光驱动PWFA铺平了道路，这可能会在紧凑的设置中提供超低发射率光束。
Heavy ion driven plasma wakefield acceleration with drift-like phase-shift acceleration scheme
Institute of Modern physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院近代物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Cockcroft Institute（科克沃尔研究所）
Achieving High Efficiency And Enhanced Beam Quality In Laser Wakefield Acceleration
Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所）；State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics and CAS Center for Excellence in Ultra-intense Laser Science, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院上海光学精密机械研究所）
We demonstrate that a long-propagating plasma bubble executing undulatory motion can be produced in the wake of two co-propagating laser pulses: a near-single-cycle injector and a multi-cycle driver. When the undulation amplitude exceeds the analytically derived threshold, highly-localized injections of plasma electrons into the bubble are followed by their long-distance acceleration. While the locations of the injection regions are controlled by the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the injector pulse, the mono-energetic spectrum of the accelerated sub-femtosecond high-charge electron bunches i…
In AWAKE a self-modulated proton bunch drives wakefields in a plasma. Recent experiments successfully demonstrated many aspects of the self-modulation of the drive bunch as well as acceleration of test electrons. Next experiments will focus on producing a multi-GeV accelerated electron bunch with low emittance and low energy spread. The experiment requires a variety of advanced beam diagnostics to characterize the self-modulated proton bunch at the picosecond time scale. These include optical transition radiation and a streak camera for short and long time scale detailed imaging of self-modula…
Terahertz-based longitudinal phase space diagnostics of laser wakefield accelerated electron beams
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所）；Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京量子信息科学研究院）
The interaction of intense particle bunches with plasma can give rise to plasma wakes capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-metre electric fields, which are orders of magnitude higher than provided by state-of-the-art radio-frequency technology. Plasma wakefields can, therefore, strongly accelerate charged particles and offer the opportunity to reach higher particle energies with smaller and hence more widely available accelerator facilities. However, the luminosity and brilliance demands of high-energy physics and photon science require particle bunches to be accelerated at repetition rates of t…
Demonstration of ultra-low emittance beams in a kHz laser wakefield accelerator and application to electron diffraction
Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée (LOA), CNRS, École polytechnique, ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（应用光学实验室，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎综合理工学院，国立高等先进技术学院，巴黎理工学院）；Center for Physical Sciences and Technology（物理与技术中心）；Vytautas Magnus University（维陶塔斯·马格努斯大学）
Laser and beam driven wakefields promise orders of magnitude increases in electric field gradients for particle accelerators for future applications. Key areas to explore include the emittance properties of the generated beams and overcoming the dephasing limit in the plasma. In this paper, the first in-depth study of the self-injection mechanism into wakefield structures from non-homogeneous cluster plasmas is provided using high-resolution two dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. The clusters which are typical structures caused by ejection of gases from a high-pressure gas jet have a di…
In the Phase 2 of the AWAKE first experimental run (from May to November 2018), an electron beam was used to probe and test proton-driven wakefield acceleration in a rubidium plasma column. In this work, we analyze the overall charge capture and shot-to-shot reproducibility of the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerator with various electron bunch injection parameters. The witness electron bunches were produced using an RF-gun equipped with a Cs2Te photocathode illuminated by a tailorable ultrafast deep ultraviolet (UV) laser pulse. The construction of the UV beam optical system enabled app…
The recent experimental data of anomalous magnetic moments strongly indicate the existence of new physics beyond the standard model. An energetic $μ^+$ beam is a potential option to the expected neutrino factories, the future muon colliders and the $μ$SR(the spin rotation, resonance and relaxation) technology. It is proposed a prompt acceleration scheme of the $μ^+$ beam in a donut wakefield driven by a shaped Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) laser pulse. The forward part of the donut wakefield can accelerate and also focus positive particle beams effectively. The LG laser is shaped by a near-critical-d…
We demonstrate laser wakefield acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches up to 15 MeV at 1 kHz repetition rate with 2.5 pC charge per bunch and a core with < 7 mrad beam divergence. Acceleration is driven by 5 fs, < 2.7 mJ laser pulses incident on a thin, near-critical density hydrogen gas jet. Low beam divergence is attributed to reduced sensitivity to laser carrier envelope phase slip, achieved in two ways using laser polarization and gas jet control: (1) electron injection into the wake on the gas jet's plasma density downramp, and (2) use of circularly polarized drive pulses. Un…
We report on experimental measurements of energy transfer efficiencies in a GeV-class laser wakefield accelerator. Both the transfer of energy from the laser to the plasma wakefield, and from the plasma to the accelerated electron beam were diagnosed by simultaneous measurement of the deceleration of laser photons and the acceleration of electrons as a function of plasma length. The extraction efficiency, which we define as the ratio of the energy gained by the electron beam to the energy lost by the self-guided laser mode, was maximised at $19\pm3$\% by tuning of the plasma density and length…
We generate inverse Compton scattered X-rays in both linear and nonlinear regimes with a 250 MeV laser wakefield electron accelerator and plasma mirror by retro-reflecting the unused drive laser light to scatter from the accelerated electrons. We characterize the X-rays using a CsI(Tl) voxelated scintillator that measures their total energy and divergence as a function of plasma mirror distance from the accelerator exit. At each plasma mirror position, these X-ray properties are correlated with the measured fluence and inferred intensity of the laser pulse after driving the accelerator to dete…
Longitudinally resolved measurement of energy-transfer efficiency in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY（德国电子同步加速器）；University of Strathclyde（斯特拉斯克莱德大学）；The Cockcroft Institute（科克克罗夫特研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）
We present the first demonstration of multi-GeV laser wakefield acceleration in a fully optically formed plasma waveguide, with an acceleration gradient as high as 25 GeV/m. The guide was formed via self-waveguiding of <15 J, 45 fs (<~300 TW) pulses over 20 cm in a low density hydrogen gas jet, with accelerated electron bunches simultaneously driven up to 5 GeV in a milliradian divergence quasi-monoenergetic peak of relative energy width ~15% and charge of at least ~10 picocoulombs. Energy gain is inversely correlated with on-axis waveguide density in the range N_e0=(1.3-3.2)x10^17 cm^(-3). We…
The Advanced Wakefield Experiment (AWAKE) is an accelerator R&D experiment at CERN using, for the first time, a high-energy proton bunch to drive wakefields in plasma and accelerating electrons to the GeV energy scale. The principle of the AWAKE experiment is described. We show experimental results of the seeded self-modulation process of the long 400 GeV SPS proton bunch, transforming the bunch into a train of micro-bunches and driving resonantly the wakefields in the 10 m long Rb plasma. We also show that externally-injected electrons can be accelerated by these wakefields to several GeV. Th…
This paper describes the utilization of beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration to implement a high-quality plasma cathode via density-downramp injection in a short injector stage at the FLASHForward facility at DESY. Electron beams with charge of up to 105 pC and energy spread of a few percent were accelerated by a tunable effective accelerating field of up to 2.7 GV/m. The plasma cathode was operated drift-free with very high injection efficiency. Sources of jitter, the emittance and divergence of the resulting beam were investigated and modeled, as were strategies for performance improvem…
