Traveling-Wave Electron Acceleration -- Beyond the dephasing and depletion limits of laser-wakefield acceleration


Traveling-Wave Electron Acceleration -- Beyond the dephasing and depletion limits of laser-wakefield acceleration

Debus, A.; Pausch, R.; Huebl, A.; Steiniger, K.; Widera, R.; Cowan, T.; Schramm, U.; Bussmann, M.

We show how to simultaneously solve several long standing limitations of laser-wakefield acceleration that have thus far prevented laser-plasma electron accelerators (LWFA) to extend into the energy realm beyond 10 GeV. Most prominently, our novel Traveling-Wave Electron Acceleration (TWEAC) approach eliminates both the dephasing and depletion constraints. The wakefield driver is a region of overlap of two obliquely incident, ultrashort laser pulses with tilted pulse-fronts in the line foci of two cylindrical mirrors, aligned to coincide with the trajectory of subsequently accelerated electrons.
TWEAC leads to quasi-static acceleration conditions, which do not suffer from laser self-phase modulation, parasitic self-injection or other plasma instabilities. Particularly, and in contrast to LWFA and PWFA, a single TWEAC-stage can arbitrarily be extended in length to higher electron energies without changing the underlying acceleration mechanism. Additionally, the TWEAC geometry greatly facilitates reducing beam transport distances between the laser-plasma accelerator and subsequent insertion devices, such as undulators, plasma lenses or colliding laser pulses, to below millimeters.
We introduce the new acceleration scheme, show results from 3D particle-in-cell simulations using PIConGPU, discuss energy scalability for both laser and electrons and elaborate on experimental realization requirements.

Keywords: Laser-produced plasmas; Plasma-based accelerators; Laser-wakefield acceleration; LWFA; Traveling-wave electron acceleration; TWEAC

  • Lecture (Conference)
    3rd European Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop, 24.-30.09.2017, La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Italien

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-26521
Publ.-Id: 26521