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- Title
TeV/m catapult acceleration of electrons in graphene layers.
- Authors
Bonţoiu, Cristian; Apsimon, Öznur; Kukstas, Egidijus; Rodin, Volodymyr; Yadav, Monika; Welsch, Carsten; Resta-López, Javier; Bonatto, Alexandre; Xia, Guoxing
- Abstract
Recent nanotechnology advances enable fabrication of layered structures with controllable inter-layer gap, giving the ultra-violet (UV) lasers access to solid-state plasmas which can be used as medium for electron acceleration. By using a linearly polarized 3 fs-long laser pulse of 100 nm wavelength and 10 21 W/cm 2 peak intensity, we show numerically that electron bunches can be accelerated along a stack of ionized graphene layers. Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations reveal a new self-injection mechanism based on edge plasma oscillations, whose amplitude depends on the distance between the graphene layers. Nanometre-size electron ribbons are electrostatically catapulted into buckets of longitudinal electric fields in less than 1 fs, as opposed to the slow electrostatic pull, common to laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) schemes in gas-plasma. Acceleration then proceeds in the blowout regime at a gradient of 4.79 TeV/m yielding a 0.4 fs-long bunch with a total charge in excess of 2.5 pC and an average energy of 6.94 MeV, after travelling through a graphene target as short as 1.5 μ m. These parameters are unprecedented within the LWFA research area and, if confirmed experimentally, may have an impact on fundamental femtosecond research.
- Subjects
SOLID-state plasmas; GRAPHENE; PLASMA oscillations; PARTICLE beam bunching; ELECTRONS; LASER pulses; FEMTOSECOND pulses
- Publication
Scientific Reports, 2023, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2045-2322
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41598-023-28617-w