Development of the multidisciplinary x-ray sources at the ELI Beamlines facility

Abstract

One of the major objectives of the ELI Beamlines project is to employ the state-of-the-art high power lasers for the generation of ultra-short pulses of particles and X-rays with unprecedented parameters to deliver stable beamline capacity to serve the broad scientific and industrial user community. The development of laser plasma-based X-ray sources at ELI beamlines, especially the ELI Gammatron beamline based on the laser plasma accelerator (LPA) is presented here. The ELI Gammatron beamline is capable of providing X-ray pulses of energies from 1-100 keV in the Betatron scheme and up to few MeV’s in the inverse Compton scheme. A dedicated LPA-based Betatron X-ray source, developed at the ELI plasma physics platform (P3) will serve as an active diagnostic of the high energy density (HED) plasma and laboratory astrophysics multi-beam experiments. In addition to this, a novel scheme for enhancing the X-ray flux of the betratron sources was proposed based on nonlinear resonances in a two-colour laser field interaction. A high-sensitivity optical probing technique for characterizing gas targets for LPA was also developed in-house to support the beamline development.