Abstract
Muons produced by the Bethe–Heitler process from laser wakefield accelerated electrons interacting with high $Z$ materials have velocities close to the laser wakefield. It is possible to accelerate those muons with laser wakefield directly. Therefore for the first time we propose an all-optical ‘Generator and Booster’ scheme to accelerate the produced muons by another laser wakefield to supply a prompt, compact, low cost and controllable muon source in laser laboratories. The trapping and acceleration of muons are analyzed by one-dimensional analytic model and verified by two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. It is shown that muons can be trapped in a broad energy range and accelerated to higher energy than that of electrons for longer dephasing length. We further extrapolate the dependence of the maximum acceleration energy of muons with the laser wakefield relativistic factor $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$ and the relevant initial energy $E_{0}$. It is shown that a maximum energy up to 15.2 GeV is promising with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}=46$ and $E_{0}=1.45~\text{GeV}$ on the existing short pulse laser facilities.
Highlights
The muon[1] plays a key role in particle physics and applied physics, such as the muon anomalous magnetic dipole moment a ≡ (g − 2)/2 measurement[2], muon collider and neutrino physics[3], muon catalyzed fusion[4], muon probe of the microscopic magnetic properties of materials[5], and muon radiography[6]
While electrons can be selfinjected through wave-breaking, an external injection is needed for muons. Such external muons could be conveniently supplied by the Bethe–Heitler lepton pair production γ + A → A + μ+μ− proposed by Titov et al.[14], where the high-energy photons come from the Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) electrons with energy up to several GeV[15,16,17,18,19,20] interacting with high Z materials. 106 dimuons could be produced by a 100 J petawatt
For the first time we suggest an all-optical muon acceleration scheme as shown in Figure 1, in which muons could be generated by the Bethe–Heitler process via high-energy photons from the Bremsstrahlung radiation of the LWFA electrons interacting with the high Z materials, called ‘Generator’, and boosted by another laser wakefield, called ‘Booster’
Summary
The muon[1] plays a key role in particle physics and applied physics, such as the muon anomalous magnetic dipole moment a ≡ (g − 2)/2 measurement[2], muon collider and neutrino physics[3], muon catalyzed fusion[4], muon probe of the microscopic magnetic properties of materials[5], and muon radiography[6]. Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), which promises the generation compact high-energy electron beam source[12, 13], could have potential application in muon source researches. While electrons can be selfinjected through wave-breaking, an external injection is needed for muons Such external muons could be conveniently supplied by the Bethe–Heitler lepton pair production γ + A → A + μ+μ− proposed by Titov et al.[14], where the high-energy photons come from the LWFA electrons with energy up to several GeV[15,16,17,18,19,20] interacting with high Z materials. We further extrapolate the muon acceleration to anticipate a muon energy up to 15.2 GeV on the existent short pulse laser facilities, which is exciting for the application in the laser laboratories
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