Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration of electrons to 2 GeV

Abstract

Laser-plasma accelerators of only a centimetre’s length have produced nearly monoenergetic electron bunches with energy as high as 1 GeV. Scaling these compact accelerators to multi-gigaelectronvolt energy would open the prospect of building X-ray free-electron lasers and linear colliders hundreds of times smaller than conventional facilities, but the 1 GeV barrier has so far proven insurmountable. Here, by applying new petawatt laser technology, we produce electron bunches with a spectrum prominently peaked at 2 GeV with only a few per cent energy spread and unprecedented sub-milliradian divergence. Petawatt pulses inject ambient plasma electrons into the laser-driven accelerator at much lower density than was previously possible, thereby overcoming the principal physical barriers to multi-gigaelectronvolt acceleration: dephasing between laser-driven wake and accelerating electrons and laser pulse erosion. Simulations indicate that with improvements in the laser-pulse focus quality, acceleration to nearly 10 GeV should be possible with the available pulse energy.

Excitation and Control of Plasma Wakefields by Multiple Laser Pulses

“…Laser-driven plasma accelerators have made impressive progress [7] in recent years. They can now generate electron beams with energies comparable to those used in synchrotrons and FELs (a few GeV), but in accelerator stages only a few centimetres long [8][9][10], with bunch durations in the femtosecond range [11][12][13], and with properties ideal for generating femtosecond duration visible to X-ray pulses [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Using an intense laser beam in interaction with muon/electron beam to probe the noncommutative QED

“…Meanwhile, in a linear collider such as an International Linear Collider(ILC) one can reach to higher energies about E = 1 TeV or even more. Furthermore, in laser-plasma accelerators, electron can be accelerated to energies from hundreds of MeV [57][58][59] to multi-GeV energies [60,61].…”

Diagnostics and controls for spatiotemporal couplings for laser-plasma accelerator drivers

“…Laser plasma accelerators have shown remarkable progress in the past decade, which has coincided with advancement in high power laser technologies. Nowadays there are multiple facilities capable of producing GeV-level electron beams [6,7,8,9].…”