The acceleration of a high-charge electron bunch to 10 GeV in a 10-cm nanoparticle-assisted wakefield accelerator

Aniculaesei, Constantin and Ha, Thanh and Yoffe, Samuel and Labun, Lance and Milton, Stephen and McCary, Edward and Spinks, Michael M. and Quevedo, Hernan J. and Labun, Ou Z. and Sain, Ritwik and Hannasch, Andrea and Zgadzaj, Rafal and Pagano, Isabella and Franco-Altamirano, Jose A. and Ringuette, Martin L. and Gaul, Erhart and Luedtke, Scott V. and Tiwari, Ganesh and Ersfeld, Bernhard and Brunetti, Enrico and Ruhl, Hartmut and Ditmire, Todd and Bruce, Sandra and Donovan, Michael E. and Downer, Michael C. and Jaroszynski, Dino A. and Hegelich, Bjorn Manuel (2024) The acceleration of a high-charge electron bunch to 10 GeV in a 10-cm nanoparticle-assisted wakefield accelerator. Matter and Radiation at Extremes, 9 (1). 014001. ISSN 2468-2047 (https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0161687)

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Abstract

An intense laser pulse focused onto a plasma can excite nonlinear plasma waves. Under appropriate conditions, electrons from the background plasma are trapped in the plasma wave and accelerated to ultra-relativistic velocities. This scheme is called a laser wakefield accelerator. In this work, we present results from a laser wakefield acceleration experiment using a petawatt-class laser to excite the wakefields as well as nanoparticles to assist the injection of electrons into the accelerating phase of the wakefields. We find that a 10-cm-long, nanoparticle-assisted laser wakefield accelerator can generate 340 pC, 10 ± 1.86 GeV electron bunches with a 3.4 GeV rms convolved energy spread and a 0.9 mrad rms divergence. It can also produce bunches with lower energies in the 4–6 GeV range.

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