Electron injection on steep ramp-up plasma density profiles in high repetition rate laser-plasma wake-field accelerators

Abstract

Electron acceleration by laser pulses with high repetition rate can be used for technical applications. To reach conditions for the wake-field laser acceleration, it was demonstrated recently in experiments that it is beneficial to use near single cycle laser drive pulses with sub-4 fs duration, with narrow waists. To explore possible electron density ramp-up injection as an alternative to ramp-down and ionization injections, we performed numerical simulations of electron bunches generation in the ramp-up region. The PIC code Epoch2D and input parameters near to experiments were used. We assumed thin plasma slabs with super Gaussian density profiles of order 4-80, FWHM about 30 µm. We found that density ramp-up injected bunches can have charges several times higher than those obtained by ionization injection. There can be created a group of up to ten bunches in a sequence of bubbles, with not too mutually different maximum energy and charges. At oblique incidence of drive pulses on steep ramp up profiles, we find significant enhancement of the first bunch charge. For large slant angles -45 or 45 degrees, the bunch charge enhancement is about twenty times. We conclude that the ramp-up injection can be a useful alternative injection on steep enough density profiles.