Abstract
The dynamics of electron acceleration driven by laser wakefield is studied in detail using the particle-in-cell code WARP with the objective to generate high-quality electron bunches with narrow energy spread and small emittance, relevant for the electron injector of a multistage accelerator. Simulation results, using experimentally achievable parameters, show that electron bunches with an energy spread of $\ensuremath{\sim}11%$ can be obtained by using an ionization-induced injection mechanism in a mm-scale length plasma. By controlling the focusing of a moderate laser power and tailoring the longitudinal plasma density profile, the electron injection beginning and end positions can be adjusted, while the electron energy can be finely tuned in the last acceleration section.
Highlights
Laser wakefield acceleration capability to sustain fields in excess of 100 GV=m and produce short pulse electron bunches, makes it a promising way towards compact high energy accelerators for a wide range of applications
Control of electron injection can be achieved either by using an additional laser pulse as in the collidingpulse scheme [8] which consists in generating electrons in a selected region of the wakefield, or by shaping the plasma density, as for example in the density-transition based injection [9,10,11,12,13], which draws on a sharp downward plasma density transition between two adjacent regions of different densities to allow precise localized injection
It is reported in [26] that low energy spread electron beams (>120 MeV,
Summary
Laser wakefield acceleration capability to sustain fields in excess of 100 GV=m and produce short pulse electron bunches, makes it a promising way towards compact high energy accelerators for a wide range of applications. By analyzing the dynamics of electron injection and acceleration in this moderately nonlinear regime, we identify the mechanisms controlling the beginning and end of injection, and propose a way of tuning finely the electron beam energy while preserving its energy spread, by tailoring the longitudinal density profile of the last acceleration zone. This method produces electron bunches with a FWHM energy spread, ΔE of ∼9 MeV for a peak energy of 82.6 MeV. III the approach to tune the electron beam energy while preserving the energy spread
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