Abstract
Laser wakefield electron acceleration (LWFA) is an emerging technology for the next generation of electron accelerators. As intense laser technology has rapidly developed, LWFA has overcome its limitations and has proven its possibilities to facilitate compact high-energy electron beams. Since high-power lasers reach peak power beyond petawatts (PW), LWFA has a new chance to explore the multi-GeV energy regime. In this article, we review the recent development of multi-GeV electron acceleration with PW lasers and discuss the limitations and perspectives of the LWFA with high-power lasers.
Highlights
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) has attracted much attention since it was proposed in 1979 by T
As the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technology [2] initiated the rapid progress of high-power lasers in the 1990s, the short-pulse high-power lasers led to the realization of laser electron accelerations [3,4,5], albeit the quality of the electron beam was not good enough for applications
The experiment was performed by focusing the PW laser pulses with a spherical mirror having an f-number of 47 onto a 7-cm-long helium gas cell
Summary
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) has attracted much attention since it was proposed in 1979 by T. As the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technology [2] initiated the rapid progress of high-power lasers in the 1990s, the short-pulse high-power lasers led to the realization of laser electron accelerations [3,4,5], albeit the quality of the electron beam was not good enough for applications. LWFA has been intensively investigated with high-power femtosecond lasers to provide high-quality electron beams and radiation sources [9] for practical applications to non-destructive inspections, ultrafast x-ray spectroscopy, and x-ray microscopy. Even though LWFA can provide a huge acceleration field, some scientific and technological problems need to be solved for practical applications. As the laser power increases, the achievable electron energy by LWFA has increased by more than an order of magnitude, compared to the first demonstration of the bubble-regime LWFA in 2004.
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