No Arabic abstract
Radio frequency particle accelerators are ubiquitous in ultra-small and ultrafast science, but their size and cost has prompted exploration of compact and scalable alternatives like the dielectric laser accelerator. We present the first demonstration of high gradient laser acceleration and deflection of electrons with a silicon structure. Driven by a five nanojoule, 130 fs mode-locked Ti:Sapphire laser at 907 nm wavelength, our devices achieve accelerating gradients in excess of 200 MeV/m and sub-optical cycle streaking of 96.30 keV electrons. These results pave the way for high gradient silicon dielectric laser accelerators using commercial lasers and sub-femtosecond electron beam experiments.
The notions of acceleration gradient and deflection gradient are generalized to phasor quantities (complex-valued functions) in the context of dielectric laser acceleration (DLA). It is shown that the electromagnetic forces imparted on a near-resonant particle traversing a unit cell of a grating-type DLA can be conveniently described by generalized acceleration and deflection gradients. A~simple formulation of the Panofsky-Wenzel theorem in terms of the generalized gradients is given. It is shown that all particle transfer properties of a DLA unit cell can be derived from a single, complex-valued function, the generalized acceleration gradient.
Dielectric laser acceleration is a versatile scheme to accelerate and control electrons with the help of femtosecond laser pulses in nanophotonic structures. We demonstrate here the generation of a train of electron pulses with individual pulse durations as short as $270pm80$ attoseconds(FWHM), measured in an indirect fashion, based on two subsequent dielectric laser interaction regions connected by a free-space electron drift section, all on a single photonic chip. In the first interaction region (the modulator), an energy modulation is imprinted on the electron pulse. During free propagation, this energy modulation evolves into a charge density modulation, which we probe in the second interaction region (the analyzer). These results will lead to new ways of probing ultrafast dynamics in matter and are essential for future laser-based particle accelerators on a photonic chip.
We present numerical simulations results on the injection and acceleration of a 10 MeV, 10 pC electrons beam in a plasma wave generated in a gas cell by a 2J, 45 fs laser beam. This modeling is related to the ESCULAP project in which the electrons accelerated by the PHIL photo-injector is injected in a gas cell irradiated by the laser beam of the LASERIX system. Extensive modeling of the experiment was performed in order to determine optimal parameters of the laser plasma configurations. This was done with the newly developed numerical code WakeTraj . We propose a configuration that benefits of a highly compressed electron bunch and for which the injected electron beam can be efficiently coupled to the plasma wave and accelerated up to 140 MeV, with an energy spread lower than 5%.
Recent progress in laser wakefield acceleration has led to the emergence of a new generation of electron and X-ray sources that may have enormous benefits for ultrafast science. These novel sources promise to become indispensable tools for the investigation of structural dynamics on the femtosecond time scale, with spatial resolution on the atomic scale. Here, we demonstrate the use of laser-wakefield-accelerated electron bunches for time-resolved electron diffraction measurements of the structural dynamics of single-crystal silicon nano-membranes pumped by an ultrafast laser pulse. In our proof-of-concept study, we resolve the silicon lattice dynamics on a picosecond time scale by deflecting the momentum-time correlated electrons in the diffraction peaks with a static magnetic field to obtain the time-dependent diffraction efficiency. Further improvements may lead to femtosecond temporal resolution, with negligible pump-probe jitter being possible with future laser-wakefield-accelerator ultrafast-electron-diffraction schemes.
The question of suitability of transfer matrix description of electrons traversing grating-type dielectric laser acceleration (DLA) structures is addressed. It is shown that although matrix considerations lead to interesting insights, the basic transfer properties of DLA cells cannot be described by a matrix. A more general notion of a transfer function is shown to be a simple and useful tool for formulating problems of particle dynamics in DLA. As an example, a focusing structure is proposed which works simultaneously for all electron phases.