Vacuum laser acceleration of relativistic electrons using plasma mirror injectors

By M. Thévenet, A. Leblanc, S. Kahaly, H. Vincenti, A. Vernier, J. Faure, F. Quéré. Nature Physics, 2015

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accelerating particles to relativistic energies over very short distances using lasers has been a long-standing goal in physics. Among the various schemes proposed for electrons, vacuum laser acceleration has attracted considerable interest and has been extensively studied theoretically because of its appealing simplicity: electrons interact with an intense laser field in vacuum and can be continuously accelerated, provided they remain at a given phase of the field until they escape the laser beam. But demonstrating this effect experimentally has proved extremely challenging, as it imposes stringent requirements on the conditions of injection of electrons in the laser field. Here, we solve this long-standing experimental problem by using a plasma mirror to inject electrons in an ultraintense laser field, and obtain clear evidence of vacuum laser acceleration. With the advent of petawatt lasers, this scheme could provide a competitive source of very high charge (nC) and ultrashort relativistic electron beams. Exploiting lasers for accelerating charged particles to relativistic velocities has long been theoretically considered. Now, applying a plasma mirror for injecting electrons into an intense laser field in vacuum is shown to lead to such acceleration.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86d7b806213a58727d220fa9eb45dc0c8273afc7

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Flé
2. M. Chiaramello
3. I. Plotnikov
4. G. Bouchard
5. F. Pérez
6. J. Derouillat
7. M. Grech
8. C. Riconda

Citations in the corpus

• Smilei : A collaborative, open-source, multi-purpose particle-in-cell code for plasma simulation (2017, background): “Recent experiments have shown that it also produces high-energy (relativistic) ultra-short and very-high-charge (nC) electron bunches [51], of interest for electron injectors.”