Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration of electrons to 2 GeV
By Xiaoming Wang, R. Zgadzaj, N. Fazel, Zhengyan Li, S. Yi, Xi Zhang, W. Henderson, Y. Y. Chang, Richard A. Korzekwa, H. Tsai and 13 more. Nature Communications, 2013
635 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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. Laser-plasma accelerators can produce high-energy electron bunches over just a few centimetres of distance, offering possible table-top accelerator capabilities. Wang et al.break the current 1 GeV barrier by applying a petawatt laser to accelerate electrons nearly monoenergetically up to 2 GeV.
Subfields: Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Radiation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/268b66b951ac753b6e6e6800ebbca05c125b5b5a
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Citations in the corpus
- Experimental Evidence of Radiation Reaction in the Collision of a High-Intensity Laser Pulse with a Laser-Wakefield Accelerated Electron Beam (2017, neutral): “Laser-wakefield accelerators are plasma-based electron accelerators driven by intense laser pulses [14 – 17], capable of accelerating electron beams to the GeV level [18 – 21].”
- Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses (2016, background): “The accelerated electron beams have energies ranging from 100 MeV [8–10] to multi-GeV [11, 12], however a MeV electron source would be more suited to many societal and scientific applications.”
- Applications of laser wakefield accelerator-based light sources (2016, methodology): “We estimated the peak brightness based on the source parameters given in the other references: Cole [94] gives the average brightness and flux, Foumaux [90] the number of photons per unit solid angle and spectral bandwidth, Plateau/Thorn [80, 99] and Albert [84] the total number of photons, the dive”
- Diagnostics for plasma-based electron accelerators (2018, background): “…singlestage laser-driven wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) that captured ambient plasma electrons and accelerated them to 2 to 4 GeV energy with few percent energy spread and up to 0.1 nC charge within an acceleration distance of only a few centimeters (Leemans et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2013).”