Abstract
We report on electron wakefield acceleration in the resonant bubble regime with few-millijoule near-single-cycle laser pulses at a kilohertz repetition rate. Using very tight focusing of the laser pulse in conjunction with microscale supersonic gas jets, we demonstrate a stable relativistic electron source with a high charge per pulse up to 24 pC/shot. The corresponding average current is 24 nA, making this kilohertz electron source useful for various applications.
Highlights
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is an established technique for producing high-energy electrons over minuscule distances [1]
Increasing the repetition rate is important for a wide range of reasons: (i) it permits reaching a higher level of stability; (ii) it opens up the possibility of active feedback control and beam optimization [8]; (iii) it enables rapid averaging over many shots, thereby significantly increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of a measurement; (iv) it can boost the average current of the electron source by several orders of magnitude
We demonstrate a laser-plasma accelerator running at kHz, producing few MeVelectron beams with stable beam charge up to 24 pC=shot, i.e. a 2 order of magnitude improvement compared to previous results
Summary
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is an established technique for producing high-energy electrons over minuscule distances [1]. Applications relying on a pump-probe scheme, such as ultrafast electron diffraction [11,12] or pulsed radiolysis [13], would greatly benefit from the higher stability and the improved signal-to-noise ratio To address these points, some of the recent work has been dedicated to developing high-repetition rate laserplasma accelerators driven by low-energy laser pulses, in the 1–10 mJ range. We demonstrate a laser-plasma accelerator running at kHz, producing few MeVelectron beams with stable beam charge up to 24 pC=shot, i.e. a 2 order of magnitude improvement compared to previous results. This yields an average current of 24 nA, the largest ever measured in a laserplasma accelerator.
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