Generation of 100-MeV attosecond electron bunches with terawatt few-cycle laser pulses

Zhu, Xing-Long and Liu, Wei-Yuan and Chen, Min and Weng, Su-Ming and He, Feng and Assmann, Ralph and Sheng, Zheng-Ming and Zhang, Jie (2021) Generation of 100-MeV attosecond electron bunches with terawatt few-cycle laser pulses. Physical Review Applied, 15 (4). 044039. ISSN 2331-7043 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.15.044039)

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Abstract

Laser-wakefield acceleration has been demonstrated to be a promising technique for compact electron accelerators. However, it is still challenging to achieve high-quality 100-MeV electron bunches of sub-femtosecond duration with current techniques. Here, we present and numerically demonstrate an efficient scheme to produce such high-energy tunable ultrashort electron bunches, which is achieved by the use of a nonlinear wakefield driven by a terawatt few-cycle laser pulse in a new structure of plasma channel. With the driving laser pulse energy of 25mJ only, the resulting electron bunch can reach 101 MeV with 7.8 pC charge, ~4 mrad divergence, ~3% energy spread, energy efficiency above 3%, and a duration of hundreds of attoseconds. As such laser pulses may be obtained with a kilohertz repetition rate and high stability, our scheme could be interesting for ultrafast science and accelerator community.

ORCID iDs

Zhu, Xing-Long, Liu, Wei-Yuan, Chen, Min, Weng, Su-Ming, He, Feng, Assmann, Ralph, Sheng, Zheng-Ming ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-9993 and Zhang, Jie;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)