Development of a Laser wakefield acceleration source as a secondary radiation driver

In laser wakefield electron acceleration a high intensity ultrashort laser pulse drives plasma density waves, inducing a high accelerating field gradient (~GV/m) which can accelerate electrons to high energies within a very short distance.
For the development of secondary radiation sources, the maximization of the bunch charge is important. For this reason we investigate the beam-loading effect at the self-injected highly nonlinear regime. Beam-loading deteriorates the accelerating field structure and limits the maximum bunch charge.
Supported by intensive Particle-in-Cell code simulations run on a GPU-cluster (using the PIConGPU code), we aim on developing a stable high peak current (hundreds of kA) electron source.