Physics Commons^™

Thomson scattering (TS) from electron beams produced in laser-plasma accelerators may generate femtosecond pulses of quasi-monochromatic, multi-MeV photons. Scaling laws suggest that reaching the necessary GeVelectron energy, with a percent-scale energy spread and five-dimensional brightness over 10^16 A/m^2, requires acceleration in centimeter-length, tenuous plasmas (n ~ 10^17 cm^-#3;3), with petawatt-class lasers. Ultrahigh per-pulse power mandates single-shot operation, frustrating applications dependent on dosage. To generate high-quality near-GeV beams at a manageable average power (thus affording kHz repetition rate), we propose acceleration in a cavity of electron density, driven with an incoherent stack of sub-Joule laser pulses through a millimeter-length, dense plasma …

Generating quasi-monochromatic, femtosecond gamma-ray pulses via Thomson scattering (TS) demands exceptional electron beam (e-beam) quality, such as percent scale energy spread and five-dimensional brightness over 10^16 A/m^2. We show that near-GeV e-beams with these metrics can be accelerated in a cavity of electron density, driven with an incoherent stack of Joule-scale laser pulses through a mm-size, dense plasma (n ~ 10^19 cm^-􀀀3). Changing the time delay, frequency difference, and energy ratio of the stack components controls the e-beam phase space on the femtosecond scale, while the modest energy of the optical driver helps afford kHz-scale repetition rate at manageable average …

It is demonstrated that synthesizing an ultrahigh-bandwidth, negatively chirped laser pulse by incoherently stacking pulses of different wavelengths makes it possible to optimize the process of electron self-injection in a dense, highly dispersive plasma (n_0 \sim 10^{19} cm^{-3}). Avoiding transformation of the driving pulse into a relativistic optical shock maintains a quasi-monoenergetic electron spectrum through electron dephasing and boosts electron energy far beyond the limits suggested by existing scaling laws. In addition, evolution of the accelerating bucket in a plasma channel is shown to produce a background-free, tunable train of femtosecond-duration, 35 - 100 kA, time-synchronized quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches. The …