Abstract
The achievable energy and the stability of accelerated electron beams have been the most critical issues in laser wakefield acceleration. As laser propagation, plasma wave formation and electron acceleration are highly nonlinear processes, the laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is extremely sensitive to initial experimental conditions. We propose a simple and elegant waveform control method for the LWFA process to enhance the performance of a laser electron accelerator by applying a fully optical and programmable technique to control the chirp of PW laser pulses. We found sensitive dependence of energy and stability of electron beams on the spectral phase of laser pulses and obtained stable 2-GeV electron beams from a 1-cm gas cell of helium. The waveform control technique for LWFA would prompt practical applications of centimeter-scale GeV-electron accelerators to a compact radiation sources in the x-ray and γ-ray regions.
Highlights
Laser wakefield electron accelerators[1] have strong potential for a generation accelerator due to its huge acceleration field
The waveform of PW laser pulse for laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) was controlled by adopting an acousto-optic device
We controlled independently each component of spectral phase terms in order to clearly observe the effect of laser chirp on the LWFA process
Summary
Laser wakefield electron accelerators[1] have strong potential for a generation accelerator due to its huge acceleration field. Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) has been intensively investigated to produce quasi-mono-energetic collimated GeV electron beams in centimeter-scale acceleration length[2,3,4]. Recent progresses of LWFA demonstrated quasi-mono-energetic electron beams in the hundreds MeV range that are produced in a stable way by utilizing methods such as colliding laser pulses[5, 6], ionization injection[7,8,9,10] and density gradient injection[11,12,13,14] with an improvement of the stability that results from explored injection schemes. We propose and demonstrate that the LWFA can be optimized by controlling the waveform of the driving laser pulse so as to enhance the energy and the stability of accelerated electron beams; the laser-plasma interaction in the LWFA is strongly affected by the coherent property of the laser pulse
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