Since they have been proposed, laser-plasma accelerators have interested the scientific community for their ability to generate electric fields exceeding the ones of Linacs and RF cavities. Several efforts have been made in order to produce monochromatic electron beams and to increase their maximum energy, often at the expense of the charge. However, some applications like femtosecond chemistry, radio-biology and industrial radiography do not need monochromatic beams, but rather highly charged ones (i.e., > 1 nC). For some of these applications it is also necessary to reduce the amount of high energy electrons (i.e., > 10 MeV), in order to avoid the activation of materials. Such beams can be produced using high Z gases like Nitrogen and Argon, exploiting the ionization injection of several plasma period.
Here we numerically and experimentally investigate this little-known regime, employing different laser energies, f-numbers and plasma densities. This allowed us to find the conditions to produce electron beams with charges up to tens of nC and exceeding 100 mrad in divergence. We will also show and explain the dependencies of these beams (e.g., their charges and energy spectra) as functions of the aforementioned laser and plasma parameters.
While synchrotron light facilities and Free Electron Lasers (FELs) are widely used for matter investigation, Laser Plasma Acceleration (LPA), delivering nowadays GeV electron beams in few centimeter accelerating distance, can be considered to drive undulator radiation and FEL. We report on the generation of undulator radiation on the COXINEL dedicated manipulation line designed for an FEL application. The LPA large divergence is handled with variable gradient permanent magnet quadrupoles and the high energy spread is reduced via a magnetic chicane. We evidence the undulator spatio-spectral signature on the first and second harmonics while measuring the radiation focused onto the entrance slit of a spectrometer equipped with a CDD camera. A good agreement is found between measurements and SRW simulations, using electron beam parameters in the undulator deduced from the measured initial electron beam parameters transported along the beamline. In addition, ray optics approach is compared to Fourier optics for the radiation propagation through optical elements.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.