Speaker
Description
Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) provide extremely large accelerating gradients for compact electron accelerators and radiation sources but are limited by dephasing, where trapped electrons outrun the accelerating phase of the wakefield. While flying-focus pulses can eliminate dephasing by driving a wake at the vacuum speed of light, these pulses involve tradeoffs such as varying spot sizes, longer durations, or larger plasma volumes. Here we show that spatiotemporally structured laser pulses can drive a wake at the vacuum speed of light in a plasma waveguide while maintaining a near-constant spot size and ultrashort duration, greatly reducing the required plasma volume. The pulses are constructed by superposing plasma-waveguide modes with appropriately selected frequencies. Scaling laws indicate that this approach can increase the single-stage energy gain by an order of magnitude over conventional LWFA. The periodic intensity peaks of the pulses may also benefit multi-pulse LWFA schemes, in which a train of pulses separated by the plasma period continually enhances the wakefield.
| Working group | WG1 |
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