Agustin Lifschitz

Observation of longitudinal and transverse self-injections in laser-plasma accelerators

Laser-plasma accelerators can produce high-quality electron beams, up to giga electronvolts in energy, from a centimetre scale device. The properties of the electron beams and the accelerator stability are largely determined by the injection stage of electrons into the accelerator. The simplest mechanism of injection is self-injection, in which the wakefield is strong enough to trap cold plasma electrons into the laser wake. The main drawback of this method is its lack of shot-to-shot stability. Here we present experimental and numerical results that demonstrate the existence of two different self-injection mechanisms. Transverse self-injection is shown to lead to low stability and poor-quality electron beams, because of a strong dependence on the intensity profile of the laser pulse. In contrast, longitudinal injection, which is unambiguously observed for the first time, is shown to lead to much more stable acceleration and higher-quality electron beams.

Dark-current-free petawatt laser-driven wakefield accelerator based on electron self-injection into an expanding plasma bubble

A dark-current-free plasma accelerator driven by a short (≤150 fs) self-guided petawatt laser pulse is proposed. The accelerator uses two plasma layers, one of which, short and dense, acts as a thin nonlinear lens. It is followed by a long rarefied plasma (~1017 electrons cm−3) in which background electrons are trapped and accelerated by a nonlinear laser wakefield. The pulse overfocused by the plasma lens diffracts in low-density plasma as in vacuum and drives in its wake a rapidly expanding electron density bubble. The expanding bubble effectively traps initially quiescent electrons. The trapped charge given by quasi-cylindrical three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations (using the CALDER-Circ code) is ~1.3 nC. When laser diffraction saturates and self-guiding begins, the bubble transforms into a bucket of a weakly nonlinear non-broken plasma wave. Self-injection thus never resumes, and the structure remains free of dark current. The CALDER-Circ modelling predicts a few π mm mrad normalized transverse emittance of electron beam accelerated in the first wake bucket. Test-particle modelling of electron acceleration over 9 cm (using the quasistatic PIC code WAKE) sets the upper limit of energy gain 2.6 GeV with ~2% relative spread.

3D modelling of negative ion extraction from a negative ion source

The development of a suitable negative ion source constitutes a crucial step in the construction of the neutral beam injector of ITER. To fulfil the ITER requirements in terms of heating and current drive, the negative ion source should deliver 40 A of D−. The achievement of such a source constitutes a technical and scientific challenge, and it requires a deeper understanding of the underlying physics of the source. The present knowledge of the ion extraction mechanism from the negative ion source is limited. It constitutes a complex problem that involves understanding the behaviour of magnetized plasma sheaths when negative ions and electrons are pulled out from the plasma. Moreover, due to the asymmetry induced by the crossed magnetic configuration used to filter the electrons, any realistic study of this problem must consider the three spatial dimensions. To address this problem in a realistic way, a 3D particles-in-cell electrostatic code specifically designed for this system was developed. The code uses a Cartesian coordinate system and it can deal with complex boundary geometry as it is the case of the extraction apertures (Hemsworth et al 2009 Nucl. Fusion 49 045006). The complex magnetic field that is applied to deflect electrons is also taken into account. This code, called ONIX, was used to investigate the plasma properties and the transport of negative ions and electrons close to a source extraction aperture. Results in the collisionless approach on the formation of the plasma meniscus and the screening of the extraction field by the plasma are presented here, as well as negative ions trajectories. Negative ion extraction efficiency from volume and surfaces is discussed.

Demonstration of relativistic electron beam focusing by a laser-plasma lens

Laser-plasma technology promises a drastic reduction of the size of high-energy electron accelerators. It could make free-electron lasers available to a broad scientific community and push further the limits of electron accelerators for high-energy physics. Furthermore, the unique femtosecond nature of the source makes it a promising tool for the study of ultrafast phenomena. However, applications are hindered by the lack of suitable lens to transport this kind of high-current electron beams mainly due to their divergence. Here we show that this issue can be solved by using a laser-plasma lens in which the field gradients are five order of magnitude larger than in conventional optics. We demonstrate a reduction of the divergence by nearly a factor of three, which should allow for an efficient coupling of the beam with a conventional beam transport line.

Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses

Laser-plasma acceleration(1,2) is an emerging technique for accelerating electrons to high energies over very short distances. The accelerated electron bunches have femtosecond duration(3,4), making them particularly relevant for applications such as ultrafast imaging(5) or femtosecond X-ray generation(6,7). Current laser-plasma accelerators deliver 100 MeV (refs 8-10) to GeV (refs 11, 12) electrons using Joule-class laser systems that are relatively large in scale and have low repetition rates, with a few shots per second at best. Nevertheless, extending laser-plasma acceleration to higher repetition rates would be extremely useful for applications requiring lower electron energy. Here, we use single-cycle laser pulses to drive high-quality MeV relativistic electron beams, thereby enabling kHz operation and dramatic downsizing of the laser system. Numerical simulations indicate that the electron bunches are only similar to 1 fs long. We anticipate that the advent of these kHz femtosecond relativistic electron sources will pave the way to applications with wide impact, such as ultrafast electron diffraction in materials(13,14) with an unprecedented sub-10 fs resolution(15).

Extracted current saturation in negative ion sources

The extraction of negatively charged particles from a negative ion source is one of the crucial issues in the development of the neutral beam injector system for future experimental reactor ITER. Full 3D electrostatic particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision code—ONIX [S. Mochalskyy et al., Nucl. Fusion 50, 105011 (2010)]—is used to simulate the hydrogen plasma behaviour and the extracted particle features in the vicinity of the plasma grid, both sides of the aperture. It is found that the contribution to the extracted negative ion current of ions born in the volume is small compared with that of ions created at the plasma grid walls. The parametric study with respect to the rate of negative ions released from the walls shows an optimum rate. Beyond this optimum, a double layer builds-up by the negative ion charge density close to the grid aperture surface reducing thus extraction probability, and therefore the extracted current. The effect of the extraction potential and magnetic field magnitudes on the extraction is also discussed. Results are in good agreement with available experimental data.

Mapping the X-Ray Emission Region in a Laser-Plasma Accelerator

The x-ray emission in laser-plasma accelerators can be a powerful tool to understand the physics of relativistic laser-plasma interaction. It is shown here that the mapping of betatron x-ray radiation can be obtained from the x-ray beam profile when an aperture mask is positioned just beyond the end of the emission region. The influence of the plasma density on the position and the longitudinal profile of the x-ray emission is investigated and compared to particle-in-cell simulations. The measurement of the x-ray emission position and length provides insight on the dynamics of the interaction, including the electron self-injection region, possible multiple injection, and the role of the electron beam driven wakefield.

Short intense laser pulse collapse in near-critical plasma.

It is observed that the interaction of an intense ultrashort laser pulse with a near-critical gas jet results in the pulse collapse and the deposition of a significant fraction of the energy. This deposition happens in a small and well-localized volume in the rising part of the gas jet, where the electrons are efficiently accelerated and heated. A collisionless plasma expansion over ~ 150 μm at a subrelativistic velocity (~ c/3) has been optically monitored in time and space, and attributed to the quasistatic field ionization of the gas associated with the hot electron current. Numerical simulations in good agreement with the observations suggest the acceleration in the collapse region of relativistic electrons, along with the excitation of a sizable magnetic dipole that sustains the electron current over several picoseconds.

Computationally efficient methods for modelling laser wakefield acceleration in the blowout regime

Electron self-injection and acceleration until dephasing in the blowout regime is studied for a set of initial conditions typical of recent experiments with 100-terawatt-class lasers. Two different approaches to computationally efficient, fully explicit, 3D particle-in-cell modelling are examined. First, the Cartesian code vorpal (Nieter, C. and Cary, J. R. 2004 VORPAL: a versatile plasma simulation code. J. Comput. Phys. 196, 538) using a perfect-dispersion electromagnetic solver precisely describes the laser pulse and bubble dynamics, taking advantage of coarser resolution in the propagation direction, with a proportionally larger time step. Using third-order splines for macroparticles helps suppress the sampling noise while keeping the usage of computational resources modest. The second way to reduce the simulation load is using reduced-geometry codes. In our case, the quasi-cylindrical code calder-circ (Lifschitz, A. F. et al. 2009 Particle-in-cell modelling of laser-plasma interaction using Fourier decomposition. J. Comput. Phys. 228(5), 1803-1814) uses decomposition of fields and currents into a set of poloidal modes, while the macroparticles move in the Cartesian 3D space. Cylindrical symmetry of the interaction allows using just two modes, reducing the computational load to roughly that of a planar Cartesian simulation while preserving the 3D nature of the interaction. This significant economy of resources allows using fine resolution in the direction of propagation and a small time step, making numerical dispersion vanishingly small, together with a large number of particles per cell, enabling good particle statistics. Quantitative agreement of two simulations indicates that these are free of numerical artefacts. Both approaches thus retrieve the physically correct evolution of the plasma bubble, recovering the intrinsic connection of electron self-injection to the nonlinear optical evolution of the driver.

Plasma wake inhibition at the collision of two laser pulses in an underdense plasma

An electron injector concept for a laser-plasma accelerator was developed by E. Esarey et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 2682 (1997)] and G. Fubiani et al. [Phys. Rev. E 70, 016402 (2004)]; it relies on the use of counterpropagating ultrashort laser pulses. In the latter work, the scheme is as follows: the pump laser pulse generates a large-amplitude laser wakefield (plasma wave). The counterpropagating injection pulse interferes with the pump laser pulse to generate a beatwave pattern. The ponderomotive force of the beatwave is able to inject plasma electrons into the wakefield. In this paper, this injection scheme is studied using one-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations. The simulations reveal phenomena and important physical processes that were not taken into account in previous models. In particular, at the collision of the laser pulses, most plasma electrons are trapped in the beatwave pattern and cannot contribute to the collective oscillation supporting the plasma wave. At this point, the fluid app...