Physics Commons^™

Optical Control Of Electron Phase Space In Plasma Accelerators With Incoherently Stacked Laser Pulses, Serge Y. Kalmykov, Xavier Davoine, Remi Lehe, Agustin F. Lifschitz, Bradley A. Shadwick

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Accordion Effect In Plasma Channels: Generation Of Tunable Comb-Like Electron Beams, Serge Y. Kalmykov, Bradley A. Shadwick, Isaac A. Ghebregziabher, Xavier Davoine, Remi Lehe, Agustin F. Lifschitz, Victor Malka

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Physical Processes At Work In Sub-30fs, Pw Laser Pulse-Driven Plasma Accelerators: Towards Gev Electron Acceleration Experiments At Cilex Facility., Arnaud Beck, Serge Y. Kalmykov, Xavier Davoine, Agustin F. Lifschitz, Bradley A. Shadwick, Victor Malka, Arnd E. Specka

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Optimal regimes and physical processes at work are identified for the first round of laser wakefield acceleration experiments proposed at a future CILEX facility. The Apollon-10P CILEX laser, delivering fully compressed, near-PW-power pulses of sub-25 fs duration, is well suited for driving electron density wakes in the blowout regime in cm-length gas targets. Early destruction of the pulse (partly due to energy depletion)prevents electrons from reaching dephasing, limiting the energy gain to about 3 GeV. However, the optimal operating regimes, found with reduced and full three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, show high energy efficiency, with about 10%of incident pulse energy transferred to …

Stable, Tunable, Quasimonoenergetic Electron Beams Produced In A Laser Wakefield Near The Threshold For Self-Injection, Sudeep Banerjee, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Nathan D. Powers, Gregory Golovin, Vidiya Ramanathan, Nathan J. Cunningham, Kevin J. Brown, Shouyuan Chen, Isaac Ghebregziabher, Bradley A. Shadwick, Donald P. Umstadter, Benjamin A. Cowan, David L. Bruhwiler, Arnaud Beck, Erik Lefebvre

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Stable operation of a laser-plasma accelerator near the threshold for electron self-injection in the blowout regime has been demonstrated with 25–60 TW, 30 fs laser pulses focused into a 3–4 millimeter length gas jet. Nearly Gaussian shape and high nanosecond contrast of the focused pulse appear to be critically important for controllable, tunable generation of 250–430 MeV electron bunches with a low energy spread, ~ 10 pC charge, a few-mrad divergence and pointing stability, and a vanishingly small low-energy background. The physical nature of the near-threshold behavior is examined using three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Simulations indicate that properly locating the nonlinear …

Computationally Efficient Methods For Modelling Laser Wakefield Acceleration In The Blowout Regime, Benjamin M. Cowan, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Arnaud Beck, Xavier Davoine, Kyle Bunkers, Agustin F. Lifschitz, Erik Lefebvre, David L. Bruhwiler, Bradley A. Shadwick, Donald P. Umstadter

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Electron self-injection and acceleration until dephasing in the blowout regime is studied for a set of initial conditions typical of recent experiments with 100-terawatt-class lasers. Two different approaches to computationally efficient, fully explicit, 3D particle-in-cell modelling are examined. First, the Cartesian code VORPAL (Nieter, C. and Cary, J. R. 2004 VORPAL: a versatile plasma simulation code. J. Comput. Phys. 196, 538) using a perfect-dispersion electromagnetic solver precisely describes the laser pulse and bubble dynamics, taking advantage of coarser resolution in the propagation direction, with a proportionally larger time step. Using third-order splines for macroparticles helps suppress the sampling noise while …

Laser Plasma Acceleration With A Negatively Chirped Pulse: All-Optical Control Over Dark Current In The Blowout Regime, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Arnaud Beck, Xavier Davoine, Erik Lefebvre, Bradley A. Shadwick

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Recent experiments with 100 terawatt-class, sub-50 femtosecond laser pulses show that electrons self-injected into a laser-driven electron density bubble can be accelerated above 0.5 gigaelectronvolt energy in a sub-centimetre length rarefied plasma. To reach this energy range, electrons must ultimately outrun the bubble and exit the accelerating phase; this, however, does not ensure high beam quality. Wake excitation increases the laser pulse bandwidth by red-shifting its head, keeping the tail unshifted. Anomalous group velocity dispersion of radiation in plasma slows down the red-shifted head, compressing the pulse into a few-cycle-long piston of relativistic intensity. Pulse transformation into a piston causes …