Speaker
Description
Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) is a technique capable of producing GeV energy scale electron beams over centimeters of acceleration length by trapping and accelerating the electrons in a plasma wave driven by a high intensity laser pulse. These relativistic electron beams undergo betatron oscillations within the plasma wake, generating bright, synchrotron-like X-ray radiation with applications in high-resolution radiography and ultrafast imaging. Scaling to higher laser powers sustains relativistic intensities over a longer Rayleigh length, driving a larger plasma wake over an extended acceleration distance and yielding higher energy electron beams. In a recent experiment at the ZEUS facility, which has achieved a peak power of 2 petawatts, we accelerated self-injected electrons to maximum energies of 2.3 GeV. Using a 4-channel calorimeter with alternating absorbers and LYSO scintillators and Monte-Carlo modeling in Geant4, we measure betatron X-rays with energies exceeding 100 keV.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-SC0023504. This work was supported by the NSF under the following awards; STROBE: A National Science Foundation Science & Technology Center under Grant No. DMR-1548924, PHY-1753165, and PHY-2308982.
| Working group | WG6 |
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