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- Title
Demonstration of a beam loaded nanocoulomb-class laser wakefield accelerator.
- Authors
Couperus, J. P.; Pausch, R.; Köhler, A.; Zarini, O.; Krämer, J. M.; Garten, M.; Huebl, A.; Gebhardt, R.; Helbig, U.; Bock, S.; Zeil, K.; Debus, A.; Bussmann, M.; Schramm, U.; Irman, A.
- Abstract
Laser-plasma wakefield accelerators have seen tremendous progress, now capable of producing quasi-monoenergetic electron beams in the GeV energy range with few-femtoseconds bunch duration. Scaling these accelerators to the nanocoulomb range would yield hundreds of kiloamperes peak current and stimulate the next generation of radiation sources covering high-field THz, high-brightness X-ray and γ-ray sources, compact free-electron lasers and laboratory-size beam-driven plasma accelerators. However, accelerators generating such currents operate in the beam loading regime where the accelerating field is strongly modified by the self-fields of the injected bunch, potentially deteriorating key beam parameters. Here we demonstrate that, if appropriately controlled, the beam loading effect can be employed to improve the accelerator's performance. Self-truncated ionization injection enables loading of unprecedented charges of ~0.5 nC within a mono-energetic peak. As the energy balance is reached, we show that the accelerator operates at the theoretically predicted optimal loading condition and the final energy spread is minimized.
- Subjects
LASER plasma accelerators; ELECTRON beams; FREE electron lasers; RADIATION; COULOMB potential
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2017, Vol 8, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-017-00592-7