Effects of nonlinearity in Thomson scattering of a high intensity laser pulse from electrons are analyzed. Analytic expressions for laser pulse shaping in amplitude and frequency are obtained which control spectrum broadening for arbitrarily high las
er pulse intensities. These analytic solutions allow prediction of the spectral form and required laser parameters to avoid broadening. The predictions are validated by numerical calculations. This control over the scattered radiation bandwidth allows of narrow bandwidth sources to be produced using high scattering intensities, which in turn greatly improves scattering yield for future x- and gamma-ray sources.
Laser plasma accelerators have the potential to reduce the size of future linacs for high energy physics by more than an order of magnitude, due to their high gradient. Research is in progress at current facilities, including the BELLA PetaWatt laser
at LBNL, towards high quality 10 GeV beams and staging of multiple modules, as well as control of injection and beam quality. The path towards high-energy physics applications will likely involve hundreds of such stages, with beam transport, conditioning and focusing. Current research focuses on addressing physics and R&D challenges required for a detailed conceptual design of a future collider. Here, the tools used to model these accelerators and their resource requirements are summarized, both for current work and to support R&D addressing issues related to collider concepts.
