Status of the FZD lab combining beams of the 150 TW laser Draco and the superconducting 40 MeV electron linac ELBE


Status of the FZD lab combining beams of the 150 TW laser Draco and the superconducting 40 MeV electron linac ELBE

Jochmann, A.; Couperus, J. P.; Debus, A.; Erler, C.; Irman, A.; Kraft, S.; Bussmann, M.; Cowan, T.; Sauerbrey, R.; Zeil, K.; Schramm, U.

Important questions regarding the scaling of laser plasma (wakefield) electron acceleration are if, as in conventional architectures, a number of plasma accelerators can be staged and if it can be combined with conventional accelerators with reasonable efficiency and stability.
At the FZD, we are therefore combining the 150 TW laser beam of the Ti:Sapphire system Draco (up to 4 J on target in about 25 fs pulse duration [1] and to be upgraded to at least 500 TW until 2012) with the electron beam of the superconducting linear accelerator ELBE in the energy range between 15 and 35 MeV. ELBE routinely provides bunches of up to 70 pC charge with a pulse duration in the ps range, which is obviously not well matched to the laser pulse parameters, but will serve as a starting point for first experiments. Pulse compression techniques combined with the use of the recently installed photo electron gun should ultimately provide bunches in the 100 fs and nC range. A fully shielded target area has been set up allowing for co- and counter-propagating laser and electron beams. Currently pulse synchronization issues are examined experimentally.

Moreover, Thomson scattering of the laser light from the relativistic electron bunch [2] can be used for the generation of hard X-rays (few ten keV) without the need for electron acceleration to the GeV level. Although in the common head-on geometry and in the linear regime only about 10^6 photons per laser pulse can be expected. This number should be sufficient for applications in pump probe experiments. A significant increase in the rate can be expected when for short electron pulses the matching of the temporal overlap is improved by a tilted pulse front approach [3] which has been extensively simulated.

[1] K. Zeil, et al., New Journal of Physics, 12, special issue to appear in april 2010
[2] for an overview with respect to ELBE parameters, see A. Debus, et al., Proc. SPIE, 9780819476333, 735908 (2009) and refs. therein.
[3] A. Debus, et al., Applied Physics B in press (2010)

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Publ.-Id: 16073