Violent acceleration of electrons by an ultra-intense pulsed laser beam

Characteristics of laser-driven electron acceleration in vacuum

“…As found in our previous studies [14], the electron final energy γ f is sensitive to the From Fig. 2(b), it can be seen that about 20% of electrons can be accelerated to GeV which display typical CAS trajectories [14], if the electrons are uniformly distributed in all phase Fig.…”

“…The results show that a large net energy gain is possible [14]. In this model, electrons were injected at a specified angle into a continuous laser beam.…”

“…To give a more exact answer to the above question, we devised a model to study the interaction of electrons with a laser field based upon a 3D computer simulation code to solve the relativistic Newton-Lorentz equations of motion [14]. The results show that a large net energy gain is possible [14].…”

Vacuum electron acceleration by an intense laser

“…although not fully understood, the most surprising and meaningful result is that when 0 a 100, the electron can be captured and violently accelerated to energies 1 GeV, with an acceleration gradient 10 GeV/cm, where c m eE a e ω / 0 0 = is a dimensionless parameter specifying the magnitude of the field, e − , m e are the electron charge and mass, respectively, c is the speed of light in vacuum, and ω is the angular frequency of the electromagnetic wave [4,5]. We call this process CAS (Capture & Acceleration Scenario).…”

“…The numerical simulation methods used here are similar to those we have used previously [4,5]. The laser beam we adopted is the lowest-order Hermite-Gaussian (0,0) mode with analytical expressions in the paraxial approximation, and is polarized in the x-direction and propagates along the z-axis.…”