Tailored mesoscopic plasma accelerates electrons exploiting parametric instability

Kumar, Rakesh Y and Sabui, Ratul and Gopal, R and Li, Feiyu and Sarkar, Soubhik and Trickey, William and Anand, M and Pasley, John and Sheng, Z-M and Trines, R M G M and Scott, R H H and Robinson, A P L and Sharma, V and Krishnamurthy, M (2024) Tailored mesoscopic plasma accelerates electrons exploiting parametric instability. New Journal of Physics, 26 (3). 033027. ISSN 1367-2630 (https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ad2ffc)

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Abstract

Laser plasma electron acceleration from the interaction of an intense femtosecond laser pulse with an isolated microparticle surrounded by a low-density gas is studied here. Experiments presented here show that optimized plasma tailoring by introducing a pre-pulse boosts parametric instabilities to produce MeV electron energies and generates electron temperatures as large as 200 keV with the total charge being as high as 350 fC/shot/sr, even at a laser intensity of a few times 1016 Wcm−2. Corroborated by particle-in-cell simulations, these measurements reveal that two plasmon decay in the vicinity of the microparticle is the main contributor to hot electron generation.

ORCID iDs

Kumar, Rakesh Y, Sabui, Ratul, Gopal, R, Li, Feiyu ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8638-8779, Sarkar, Soubhik, Trickey, William, Anand, M, Pasley, John, Sheng, Z-M ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-9993, Trines, R M G M, Scott, R H H, Robinson, A P L, Sharma, V and Krishnamurthy, M;
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