Abstract
Plasma accelerators can generate ultra-high-brightness electron beams that open the door to light sources with a smaller physical footprint and properties un-achievable with conventional accelerator technology. In this paper, we show that electron beams from Plasma WakeField Accelerators can generate few-cycle coherent tunable soft x-ray pulses with TW peak power and a duration of tens of attoseconds, an order of magnitude more powerful, shorter, and with better stability than state-of-the-art X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs). Such a light source would significantly enhance the ability to experimentally investigate electron dynamics on ultrafast timescales, having a broad-ranging impact across multiple scientific fields. Rather than starting from noise as in typical XFELs, the x-ray emission in this approach is driven by coherent radiation from a pre-bunched, high peak current electron beam of attosecond duration. This relaxes the restrictive tolerances that have hindered progress toward utilizing plasma accelerators as coherent x-ray drivers thus far, presenting a new paradigm for advanced accelerator light source applications.
Highlights
Attosecond science is revolutionizing the way we understand and control electron motion at the quantum level.1,2 This revolution has been enabled by two types of attosecond light sources: Ones based on High-Harmonic Generation (HHG) in gas3–5 and, more recently, X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs).6,7 HHG sources are capable of generating ultra-short pulses down to 43 as duration,8 with pulse energy in the pJ-range for soft x rays
We show that electron beams from Plasma WakeField Accelerators can generate few-cycle coherent tunable soft x-ray pulses with TW peak power and a duration of tens of attoseconds, an order of magnitude more powerful, shorter, and with better stability than state-of-the-art X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs)
We show that few-cycle coherent soft x-ray pulses in the 0.1–1 mJ energy range with sub-100 as pulse duration can be obtained using beams generated with a Plasma WakeField Accelerator (PWFA), combining the benefits of HHG and XFEL sources
Summary
Attosecond science is revolutionizing the way we understand and control electron motion at the quantum level. This revolution has been enabled by two types of attosecond light sources: Ones based on High-Harmonic Generation (HHG) in gas and, more recently, X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs). HHG sources are capable of generating ultra-short pulses down to 43 as duration, with pulse energy in the pJ-range for soft x rays. Rather than employing the high-gain SASE FEL principle starting from noise, the x-ray emission in this source is driven by coherent radiation from a pre-bunched, near Mega-Ampere (MA) current electron beam of attosecond duration (see Fig. 1).21–27 This approach presents a new paradigm for PWFA-driven light sources as it relaxes the tight beam energy spread, emittance, and pointing stability constraints, which have hindered progress toward achieving XFEL gain far. [(d) and (e)] The beam’s %-level bunching factor at x-ray wavelengths enables high power coherent emission in an m-length undulator This approach relaxes the requirement on beam emittance, energy spread, and pointing stability, which have far hindered the realization of a high-gain FEL driven by a plasma accelerator. This foregoes one of the main advantages of plasma-based accelerators when compared to conventional RF systems, which enables performance gains for the light source beyond reducing the physical footprint of the accelerator facility
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