Free-electron lasing at 27 nanometres based on a laser wakefield accelerator

Accelerate to the next level

“…However, compared to established acceleration concepts, laser-plasma accelerators are still under development and their readiness for applications has yet to be established. Only recently, a proof-of-principle demonstration of free-electron lasing using a laser-plasma accelerator was reported 3 , which paves the way towards their use as light sources. Another example illustrating how laserplasma accelerators pick up the pace towards practical applications is part of this issue: Florian Kroll and colleagues report a step towards the clinical use of laser-plasma accelerators 4 .…”

Snowmass Whitepaper AF6: Plasma-Based Particle Sources

“…However, there are measurements that indicate that some of the local bunch properties (slice emittance, slice energy spread) are smaller than that of the overall bunch and that they might be temporally correlated. For example, this includes the observation of micro-bunching of LWFA bunches at optical wavelengths [11], the demonstration of energy-chirp compensation through a tailored plasma density [12], and the observation of exponential amplification of a laser-driven free-electron laser (FEL) [13].…”

Demonstration of kilohertz operation of Hydrodynamic Optical-Field-Ionized Plasma Channels

“…Many potential applications of plasma acceleratorssuch as compact light sources [8][9][10][11][12][13], including freeelectron lasers [14] , and future particle colliders [15] -require the generation of multi-GeV electron bunches at high ( 1 kHz) pulse repetition rates, and with high stability over extended periods. Hence a major goal of * aaron.alejo@usc.es current research in the field is the development of highintensity waveguides capable of meeting these challenging requirements.…”