Quasi-monoenergetic laser-plasma acceleration of electrons to 2 GeV
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 11 June 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 4 (1), 1988
- https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2988
Abstract
Laser-plasma accelerators of only a centimetre’s length have produced nearly monoenergetic electron bunches with energy as high as 1 GeV. Scaling these compact accelerators to multi-gigaelectronvolt energy would open the prospect of building X-ray free-electron lasers and linear colliders hundreds of times smaller than conventional facilities, but the 1 GeV barrier has so far proven insurmountable. Here, by applying new petawatt laser technology, we produce electron bunches with a spectrum prominently peaked at 2 GeV with only a few per cent energy spread and unprecedented sub-milliradian divergence. Petawatt pulses inject ambient plasma electrons into the laser-driven accelerator at much lower density than was previously possible, thereby overcoming the principal physical barriers to multi-gigaelectronvolt acceleration: dephasing between laser-driven wake and accelerating electrons and laser pulse erosion. Simulations indicate that with improvements in the laser-pulse focus quality, acceleration to nearly 10 GeV should be possible with the available pulse energy.Keywords
This publication has 39 references indexed in Scilit:
- Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHCPhysics Letters B, 2012
- Self-Guided Laser Wakefield Acceleration beyond 1 GeV Using Ionization-Induced InjectionPhysical Review Letters, 2010
- Measurements of the Critical Power for Self-Injection of Electrons in a Laser Wakefield AcceleratorPhysical Review Letters, 2009
- Physics of laser-driven plasma-based electron acceleratorsReviews of Modern Physics, 2009
- Laser-driven plasma-wave electron acceleratorsPhysics Today, 2009
- Towards a table-top free-electron laserNature Physics, 2008
- Generating multi-GeV electron bunches using single stage laser wakefield acceleration in a 3D nonlinear regimePhysical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, 2007
- GeV electron beams from a centimetre-scale acceleratorNature Physics, 2006
- An Introduction to Particle AcceleratorsPublished by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,2001
- Laser Electron AcceleratorPhysical Review Letters, 1979