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Selected Works

2006

Laser wakefield acceleration

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physics

Injection, Trapping, And Acceleration Of Electrons In A Three-Dimensional Nonlinear Laser Wakefield, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Leonid M. Gorbunov, Patrick Mora, Gennady Shvets Oct 2006

Injection, Trapping, And Acceleration Of Electrons In A Three-Dimensional Nonlinear Laser Wakefield, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Leonid M. Gorbunov, Patrick Mora, Gennady Shvets

Serge Youri Kalmykov

It is demonstrated that the accelerating and focusing phases of the nonlinear three-dimensional axisymmetric laser wake can almost entirely overlap starting from a certain distance behind the laser pulse in homogeneous plasma. Such field structure results from the curvature of phase fronts due to the radially inhomogeneous relativistic shift of plasma frequency. Consequently, the number of trapped low-energy electrons can be much greater than that predicted by the linear wake theory. This effect is favorable for quasi-monoenergetic acceleration of a considerable charge (several hundreds of pC) to about 1 GeV per electron in the plasma wakefield driven by an ultrashort …


Snapshots Of Laser Wakefields, Nicholas H. Matlis, Steven A. Reed, Stepan S. Bulanov, Vladimir Chvykov, Galina Kalintchenko, Takeshi Matsuoka, Pascal Rousseau, Victor Yanovsky, Anatoly Maksimchuk, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Gennady Shvets, Michael C. Downer Oct 2006

Snapshots Of Laser Wakefields, Nicholas H. Matlis, Steven A. Reed, Stepan S. Bulanov, Vladimir Chvykov, Galina Kalintchenko, Takeshi Matsuoka, Pascal Rousseau, Victor Yanovsky, Anatoly Maksimchuk, Serguei Y. Kalmykov, Gennady Shvets, Michael C. Downer

Serge Youri Kalmykov

Tabletop plasma accelerators can now produce GeV-range electron beams and femtosecond X-ray pulses, providing compact radiation sources for medicine, nuclear engineering, materials science and high-energy physics. In these accelerators, electrons surf on electric fields exceeding 100 GeV m^{−1}, which is more than 1,000 times stronger than achievable in conventional accelerators. These fields are generated within plasma structures (such as Langmuir waves or electron density ‘bubbles’) propagating near light speed behind laser or charged-particle driving pulses. Here, we demonstrate single-shot visualization of laser-wakefield accelerator structures for the first time. Our ‘snapshots’ capture the evolution of multiple wake periods, detect structure variations …