We demonstrate experimentally the resonant excitation of plasma waves by trains of laser pulses. We also take an important first step to achieving an energy recovery plasma accelerator by showing that unused wakefield energy can be removed by an out-of-resonance trailing laser pulse. The measured laser wakefields are found to be in excellent agreement with analytical and numerical models of wakefield excitation in the linear regime. Our results indicate a promising direction for achieving highly controlled, GeV-scale laser-plasma accelerators operating at multi-kilohertz repetition rates. This article was published in Physical Review Letters 119, 044802 on 27 July 2017. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.044802 Copyright 2017 American Physical Society.
In a laser plasma accelerator (LPA), a short and intense laser pulse propagating in a plasma drives a wakefield (a plasma wave with a relativistic phase velocity) that can sustain extremely large electric fields, enabling compact accelerating structures. Potential LPA applications include compact radiation sources and high energy linear colliders. We propose and study plasma wave excitation by an incoherent combination of a large number of low energy laser pulses (i.e., without constraining the pulse phases). We show that, in spite of the incoherent nature of electromagnetic fields within the volume occupied by the pulses, the excited wakefield is regular and its amplitude is comparable or equal to that obtained using a single, coherent pulse with the same energy. These results provide a path to the next generation of LPA-based applications, where incoherently combined multiple pulses may enable high repetition rate, high average power LPAs.
Wakefield particle acceleration in hollow plasma channels is under extensive study nowadays. Here we consider an externally magnetized plasma layer (external magnetic field of arbitrary magnitude is along the structure axis) and investigate wakefields generated by a point charge passing along the layer axis.
Accelerating particles to high energies in plasma wakefields is considered to be a promising technique with good energy efficiency and high gradient. While important progress has been made in plasma-based electron acceleration, positron acceleration in plasma has been scarcely studied and a fully self-consistent and optimal scenario has not yet been identified. For high energy physics applications where an electron-positron collider would be desired, the ability to accelerate positrons in plasma wakefields is however paramount. Here we show that the preservation of beam quality can be compromised in a plasma wakefield loaded with a positron beam, and a trade-off between energy efficiency and beam quality needs to be found. For electron beams driving linear plasma wakefields, we have found that despite the transversely nonlinear focusing force induced by positron beam loading, the bunch quickly evolves toward an equilibrium distribution with limited emittance growth. Particle-in-cell simulations show that for {mu}m-scale normalized emittance, the growth of uncorrelated energy spread sets an important limit. Our results demonstrate that the linear or moderately nonlinear regimes with Gaussian drivers provide a good trade-off, achieving simultaneously energy-transfer efficiencies exceeding 30% and uncorrelated energy spread below 1%, while donut-shaped drivers in the nonlinear regime are more appropriate to accelerate high-charge bunches at higher gradients, at the cost of a degraded trade-off between efficiency and beam quality.
Adapting a plane hydrodynamical model we briefly revisit the study of the impact of a very short and intense laser pulse onto a diluted plasma, the formation of a plasma wave, its wave-breaking, the occurrence of the slingshot effect.
At the laser acceleration of self-injected electron bunch by plasma wakefield it is important to form bunch with small energy spread and small size. It has been shown that laser-pulse shaping on radius, intensity and shape controls characteristics of the self-injected electron bunch and provides at certain shaping small energy spread and small size of self-injected and accelerated electron bunch.