Abstract
A simple way of implementing a scalable laser-driven nanophotonic electron accelerator on a chip is presented. The design requires only a single incident laser pulse and can be fabricated straightforwardly on commercial silicon-on-insulator wafers. We investigate the low-energy regime of tabletop electron microscopes where the silicon structures safely allow peak gradients of about 150 MeV/m. By means of a three-dimensional alternating-phase-focusing scheme, we obtain about half of the peak gradient as the average gradient with six-dimensional confinement and full-length scalability. The structures are completely designed within the device layer of the wafer and can be arranged in stages. We choose the stages as energy doublers and outline how errors in the handshake between the stages can be corrected by on-chip steerers. Since the electron pulse length in the attosecond realm is preserved, our chip is the ideal energy booster for ultrafast-electron-diffraction machines, opening the megaelectronvolt scale on tabletop setups.
Highlights
Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) were proposed as long ago as 1962 [1,2]
VI concludes with an outlook of controlling the remaining few external parameters by a digital-twin model and enabling ultrafast electron diffraction on the megaelectronvolt level with tabletop setups based on the chips introduced here
We show two different designs of nanophotonic linear electron accelerators, which double the energy of tabletop electron microscopes
Summary
Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) were proposed as long ago as 1962 [1,2]. experimental demonstrations of the high acceleration gradients due to short pulses and high material damage thresholds came 50 years later [3,4] by means of modern femtosecond lasers and lithographic nanofabrication. We imagine a setup and a timeline oriented on the history of the integrated circuit, which first needed much external equipment but nowadays is a stand-alone device working with nearly 100% reliability Pursuing this goal, we deem robustness and scalability as more critical than efficiency or the number of features and construct the accelerator according to the beam dynamics necessities to minimize beam losses for given injector parameters. A solution to this problem is to use the evanescent fields from the nanophotonic structures themselves and arrange them such that they keep the electron beam in the channel without external focusing being required This is achieved by the alternating-phase-focusing (APF) technique [21,23], which presents a design recipe for the chip as a composition of individual cells, to which periodic boundary conditions can be applied in a good approximation. VI concludes with an outlook of controlling the remaining few external parameters by a digital-twin model and enabling ultrafast electron diffraction on the megaelectronvolt level with tabletop setups based on the chips introduced here
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