Exploring laser-wakefield-accelerator regimes for near-term lasers using particle-in-cell simulation in Lorentz-boosted frames

Abstract

Plasma-based acceleration offers compact accelerators with potential applications for high-energy physics and photon sources. The past five years have seen an explosion of experimental results with monoenergetic electron beams up to 1 GeV on a centimetre-scale, using plasma waves driven by intense lasers. The next decade will see tremendous increases in laser power and energy, permitting beam energies beyond 10 GeV. Leveraging on the Lorentz transformations to bring the laser and plasma spatial scales together, we have reduced the computational time for modelling laser–plasma accelerators by several orders of magnitude, including all the relevant physics. This scheme enables the first one-to-one particle-in-cell simulations of the next generation of accelerators at the energy frontier. Our results demonstrate that, for a given laser energy, choices in laser and plasma parameters strongly affect the output electron beam energy, charge and quality, and that all of these parameters can be optimized. Modelling the interaction of an intense laser with a plasma in an optimal ‘Lorentz boosted’ frame of reference decreases by many orders of magnitude the computation time needed to simulate a laser-driven particle accelerator. This provides a powerful tool for optimizing the characteristics of accelerators driven by the next generation of high-intensity lasers, which will be able to deliver powers beyond a petawatt.