Dark-current-free petawatt laser-driven wakefield accelerator based on electron self-injection into an expanding plasma bubble - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion Année : 2011

Dark-current-free petawatt laser-driven wakefield accelerator based on electron self-injection into an expanding plasma bubble

S y Kalmykov
  • Fonction : Auteur
X Davoine
  • Fonction : Auteur
E Lefebvre
  • Fonction : Auteur
V Khudik
  • Fonction : Auteur
G Shvets
  • Fonction : Auteur
M C Downer
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

A dark-current-free plasma accelerator driven by a short (≤150 fs) self-guided petawatt laser pulse is proposed. The accelerator uses two plasma layers, one of which, short and dense, acts as a thin nonlinear lens. It is followed by a long rarefied plasma (~1017 electrons cm−3) in which background electrons are trapped and accelerated by a nonlinear laser wakefield. The pulse overfocused by the plasma lens diffracts in low-density plasma as in vacuum and drives in its wake a rapidly expanding electron density bubble. The expanding bubble effectively traps initially quiescent electrons. The trapped charge given by quasi-cylindrical three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations (using the CALDER-Circ code) is ~1.3 nC. When laser diffraction saturates and self-guiding begins, the bubble transforms into a bucket of a weakly nonlinear non-broken plasma wave. Self-injection thus never resumes, and the structure remains free of dark current. The CALDER-Circ modelling predicts a few π mm mrad normalized transverse emittance of electron beam accelerated in the first wake bucket. Test-particle modelling of electron acceleration over 9 cm (using the quasistatic PIC code WAKE) sets the upper limit of energy gain 2.6 GeV with ~2% relative spread.

Dates et versions

hal-01164312 , version 1 (16-06-2015)

Identifiants

Citer

S y Kalmykov, S A Yi, Alexandre Beck, a F Lifschitz, X Davoine, et al.. Dark-current-free petawatt laser-driven wakefield accelerator based on electron self-injection into an expanding plasma bubble. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 2011, 53 (1), pp.014006. ⟨10.1088/0741-3335/53/1/014006⟩. ⟨hal-01164312⟩
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