激光等离子体加速器由于在过去十年中取得的显著进展，已经成为能量高达千兆电子伏范围的超短电子束的紧凑源。这些电子聚束的直接应用是产生短脉冲X射线辐射源。在这封信中，我们研究了一个全光驱动的X射线源的基础上的组合的激光等离子体加速器和等离子体波荡器。利用激光等离子体波的纵向电场使电子横向摆动。该等离子体波荡器的周期等于等离子体波长，可以利用100-200 MeV范围内的电子能量实现10 keV范围内的可调谐光子能量。考虑到一个10 s TW级的飞秒激光系统，强度参数K约为0.5、周期约为10的波荡器可以与激光等离子体加速器相结合，从而使每个电子产生几个10^-2的X射线光子。
英文摘要：
Laser-plasma accelerators have become compact sources of ultrashort electron bunches at energies up to the gigaelectronvolt range thanks to the remarkable progress made over the past decade. A direct application of these electron bunches is the production of short pulse x-ray radiation sources. In this letter, we study a fully optically driven x-ray source based on the combination of a laser-plasma accelerator and a plasma wave undulator. The longitudinal electric field of a laser-generated plasma wave is used to wiggle electrons transversally. The period of this plasma undulator being equal to the plasma wavelength, tunable photon energies in the 10 keV range can be achieved with electron energies in the 100-200 MeV range. Considering a 10s TW class femtosecond laser system, undulators with a strength parameter K~0.5 and with about ten periods can be combined with a laser-plasma accelerator, resulting in several 10^-2 emitted x-ray photons per electron.
Accelerator-based X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) are the latest addition to the revolutionary tools of discovery for the 21st century. The two major components of an XFEL are an accelerator-produced electron beam and a magnetic undulator which tend to be kilometer-scale long and expensive. Here, we present an ultra-compact scheme to produce 10s of attosecond X-ray pulses with several GW peak power utilizing a novel aspect of the FEL instability using a highly chirped, pre-bunched and ultra-bright electron beam from a plasma-based accelerator interacting with an optical undulator. The self-…
The idea of using a gas-mixture comprising atoms with high mass number in order to increase proton energies in laser induced plasma acceleration at under critical density is investigated by means of 2D PIC (Particle-In-Cell) simulations. Comparing and discussing the case of a pure hydrogen plasma, and that of a plasma containing higher mass number species with a small percentage of hydrogen, we demonstrated that the mixture enhances the energies of the accelerated protons. We also show that using a gas-mixture introduces the possibility of using the densities ratio to change the relative accel…
The accelerating gradients in conventional linear accelerators are currently limited to 100 MV per meter. Plasma-based accelerators have the ability to sustain accelerating gradients which are several orders of magnitude greater than that obtained in conventionalaccelerators. Due to the rapid development of laser technology the laser-plasma-based accelerators are of great interest now. Over the past decade, successful experiments on laser wakefield acceleration of electrons in the plasma have confirmed the relevance of this acceleration. Evidently, the large accelerating gradients in the laser…
Particle-In-Cell (PIC) methods are frequently used for kinetic, high-fidelity simulations of plasmas. Implicit formulations of PIC algorithms feature strong conservation properties, up to numerical round-off errors, and are not subject to time-step limitations which make them an attractive candidate to use in simulations fusion plasmas. Currently they remain prohibitively expensive for high-fidelity simulation of macroscopic plasmas. We investigate how amortized solvers can be incorporated with PIC methods for simulations of plasmas. Incorporated into the amortized solver, a neural network pre…
The Smith Purcell radiation as one promising THz radiation source has been studied for decades. Various structure designs and beam configurations have been proposed. In this paper, we report our recent exploration of Smith Purcell radiation driven by electron beam accelerated by plasma wakefield.
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…
Utilizing laser plasma wakefield to accelerate ultra-high charge electron beam is critical for many pioneering applications, for example to efficiently produce nuclear isomers with short lifetimes which may be widely used. However, because of the beam loading effect, electron charge in a single plasma bubble is limited in level of hundreds picocoulomb. Here, we experimentally present that a hundred kilo-ampere, twenty nanocoulomb, tens of MeV collimated electron beam is produced from a chain of wakefield acceleration, via a tightly focused intense laser pulse transversely matched in dense plas…
Electron beam quality is paramount for X-ray pulse production in free-electron-lasers (FELs). State-of-the-art linear accelerators (linacs) can deliver multi-GeV electron beams with sufficient quality for hard X-ray-FELs, albeit requiring km-scale setups, whereas plasma-based accelerators can produce multi-GeV electron beams on metre-scale distances, and begin to reach beam qualities sufficient for EUV FELs. We show, that electron beams from plasma photocathodes many orders of magnitude brighter than state-of-the-art can be generated in plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA), and then extracted,…
At the laser acceleration of self-injected electron bunch by plasma wakefield it is important to form bunch with small energy spread and small size. It has been shown that laser-pulse shaping on radius, intensity and shape controls characteristics of the self-injected electron bunch and provides at certain shaping small energy spread and small size of self-injected and accelerated electron bunch.
Plasma-based accelerators have achieved tremendous progress in the past few decades, thanks to the advances of high power lasers and the availability of high-energy and relativistic particle beams. However, the electrons (or positrons) accelerated in the plasma wakefields are subject to radiation losses, which generally suppress the final energy gains of the beams. In this paper, radiation reaction in plasma-based high-energy accelerators is investigated using test particle approach. Energy-frontier TeV colliders based on a multiple stage laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerator and a single-…
Since numerical computing with MATLAB offers a wide variety of advantages, such as easier developing and debugging of computational codes rather than lower-level languages, the popularity of this tool is significantly increased in the past decade. However, MATLAB is slower than other languages. Moreover, utilizing MATLAB parallel computing toolbox on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) face some limitations. The lack of attention to these limitations reduces the program execution speed. Even sometimes, parallel GPU codes are slower than serial. In this paper, some techniques in using MATLAB par…
A new scheme of proton acceleration from a laser-driven near-critical-density plasma is proposed. Plasma with a tailored density profile allows a two-stage acceleration of protons. The protons are pre-accelerated in the laser-driven wakefields, and are then further accelerated by the collisionless shock, launched from the rear side of the plasma. The shock has a small transverse size, and it generates a strong space-charge field, which defocuses protons in such a way, that only those protons with the highest energies and low energy spread remains collimated. Theoretical and numerical analysis …
The radiation pressure of next generation ultra-high intensity ($>10^{23}$ W/cm$^{2}$) lasers could efficiently accelerate ions to GeV energies. However, nonlinear quantum-electrodynamic effects play an important role in the interaction of these laser pulses with matter. Here we show that these effects may lead to the production of an extremely dense ($\sim10^{24}$ cm$^{-3}$) pair-plasma which absorbs the laser pulse consequently reducing the accelerated ion energy and energy conversion efficiency by up to 30-50\% \& 50-65\%, respectively. Thus we identify the regimes of laser-matter interacti…
By using Dazzler system and tilting compressor grating, we provide an effective way of using the laser group delay dispersion (GDD) to continuously steer the high energy electron beam which is accelerated by asymmetric laser-wakefield. The deviation angle of electrons is as the same as the angular chirped laser pulse from its initial optical axis, which is determined by the laser pulse-front-tilt (PFT). This unique method can be continuously used to control over the pointing direction of electron-pulses to the requisite trajectories, especially for the alignment sensitive devices such as elect…
Laser-triggered ionization injection is a promising way of generating controllable high-quality electrons in plasma-based acceleration. We show that ionization injection of electrons into a fully nonlinear plasma wave wake using a laser pulse comprising of one or more Laguerre-Gaussian modes with combinations of spin and orbital angular momentum can generate exotic three-dimensional (3D) spatial distributions of high-quality relativistic electrons. The phase dependent residual momenta and initial positions of the ionized electrons are encoded into their final phase space distributions, leading…
Heating a solid with laser-accelerated fast electrons is unique way for a laboratory experiment to generate a plane powerful shock wave with a pressure of several hundred or even thousands of Mbar. Behind the front of such a powerful shock wave, dense plasma is heated to a temperature of several keV. Then, a high rate of radiation energy loss occurs even in low-$Z$ plasmas. The effect of strong compression of matter due to radiation cooling in a gigabar shock wave driven by fast electrons is found in computational and theoretical researches. It is shown that the effect of radiation cooling lea…
Plasma wakefield accelerators are capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-centimeter accelerating fields, surpassing the electric breakdown threshold in state-of-the-art accelerator modules by 3-4 orders of magnitude. Beam-driven wakefields offer particularly attractive conditions for the generation and acceleration of high-quality beams. However, this scheme relies on kilometer-scale accelerators. Here, we report on the demonstration of a millimeter-scale plasma accelerator powered by laser-accelerated electron beams. We showcase the acceleration of electron beams to 130 MeV, consistent with simul…
Recent progress in laser-driven plasma acceleration now enables the acceleration of electrons to several gigaelectronvolts. Taking advantage of these novel accelerators, ultra-short, compact and spatially coherent X-ray sources called betatron radiation have been developed and applied to high-resolution imaging. However, the scope of the betatron sources is limited by a low energy efficiency and a photon energy in the 10's of kiloelectronvolt range, which for example prohibits the use of these sources for probing dense matter. Here, based on three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we p…
The production of polarized proton beams with multi-GeV energies in ultra-intense laser interaction with targets is studied with three-dimensional Particle-In-Cell simulations. A near-critical density plasma target with pre-polarized proton and tritium ions is considered for the proton acceleration. The pre-polarized protons are initially accelerated by laser radiation pressure before injection and further acceleration in a bubble-like wakefield. The temporal dynamics of proton polarization is tracked via the T-BMT equation, and it is found that the proton polarization state can be altered bot…
The paper presents the results of numerical PIC-simulation of accelerated and drive bunches dynamics in a dielectric waveguide filled with radially inhomogeneous plasma. The wakefield was excited by the electron bunch in a quartz (permittivity 3.75) dielectric tube with outer and inner diameters of 1.2 mm and 1.0 mm, respectively, which was nested into a cylindrical metallic waveguide. The drive bunch characteristics were chosen to be: 5 GeV for electron energy, 3 nC for the charge, 0.2 mm - the bunch length, 0.9 mm - the bunch diameter. The accelerated bunch had the same parameters, except fo…
