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      Emittance and divergence of laser wakefield accelerated electrons

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          Laser Electron Accelerator

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            A laser-plasma accelerator producing monoenergetic electron beams.

            Particle accelerators are used in a wide variety of fields, ranging from medicine and biology to high-energy physics. The accelerating fields in conventional accelerators are limited to a few tens of MeV m(-1), owing to material breakdown at the walls of the structure. Thus, the production of energetic particle beams currently requires large-scale accelerators and expensive infrastructures. Laser-plasma accelerators have been proposed as a next generation of compact accelerators because of the huge electric fields they can sustain (>100 GeV m(-1)). However, it has been difficult to use them efficiently for applications because they have produced poor-quality particle beams with large energy spreads, owing to a randomization of electrons in phase space. Here we demonstrate that this randomization can be suppressed and that the quality of the electron beams can be dramatically enhanced. Within a length of 3 mm, the laser drives a plasma bubble that traps and accelerates plasma electrons. The resulting electron beam is extremely collimated and quasi-monoenergetic, with a high charge of 0.5 nC at 170 MeV.
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              Monoenergetic beams of relativistic electrons from intense laser-plasma interactions.

              High-power lasers that fit into a university-scale laboratory can now reach focused intensities of more than 10(19) W cm(-2) at high repetition rates. Such lasers are capable of producing beams of energetic electrons, protons and gamma-rays. Relativistic electrons are generated through the breaking of large-amplitude relativistic plasma waves created in the wake of the laser pulse as it propagates through a plasma, or through a direct interaction between the laser field and the electrons in the plasma. However, the electron beams produced from previous laser-plasma experiments have a large energy spread, limiting their use for potential applications. Here we report high-resolution energy measurements of the electron beams produced from intense laser-plasma interactions, showing that--under particular plasma conditions--it is possible to generate beams of relativistic electrons with low divergence and a small energy spread (less than three per cent). The monoenergetic features were observed in the electron energy spectrum for plasma densities just above a threshold required for breaking of the plasma wave. These features were observed consistently in the electron spectrum, although the energy of the beam was observed to vary from shot to shot. If the issue of energy reproducibility can be addressed, it should be possible to generate ultrashort monoenergetic electron bunches of tunable energy, holding great promise for the future development of 'table-top' particle accelerators.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                PRABFM
                Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams
                Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams
                American Physical Society (APS)
                1098-4402
                September 2010
                September 22 2010
                : 13
                : 9
                Article
                10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.13.092803
                3297c32b-e6d6-45d0-8444-a9d369bd9dda
                © 2010

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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