Quasimonoenergetic electrons from unphased injection into channel guided laser wakefield accelerators

Abstract

A high-quality electron beam can be extracted from a channel guided laser wakefield accelerator without confining the injected particles to a small region of phase. By careful choice of the injection energy, a regime can be found where uniformly phased particles are quickly bunched by the accelerator itself and subsequently accelerated to high energy. The process is particularly effective in a plasma channel because of a favorable phase shift that occurs in the focusing fields. Furthermore, particle-in-cell simulations show that the self-fields of the injected bunches actually tend to reduce the energy spread on the final beam. The final beam characteristics can be calculated using a computationally inexpensive Hamiltonian formulation when beam-loading effects are minimal.