Speaker
Description
Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFA) have been experimentally demonstrated to yield high energy and charge density electron beams within a compact footprint, making these sources attractive for a number of applications. The electron beam energy from an LWFA is limited by the laser’s stability in plasma as described by a few length scales, the most constraining of which being the diffraction length of the laser. Hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) channels are an emerging technology used to increase the achievable energy by eliminating the diffraction length constraint of LWFA. These channels also efficiently utilize laser energy for beam acceleration, which makes them promising for industrial applications of multi-GeV electron beams when compared to unguided schemes. These HOFI-based plasma targets may be optimized for beam loading, acceleration, and efficient conversion of LWFA drive laser energy via Bayesian optimization. However, the added complexity of HOFI channels requires additional modelling steps to ensure that the plasma profiles passed to LWFA models embody realistically non-ideal systems. Here, we present a prototype LWFA Bayesian optimization pipeline incorporating hydrodynamic fluid simulations of plasma channel expansion, particle-in-cell simulations of LWFA, and simulations of the downstream transport lattice. We present a resultant plasma density profile that is optimal for LWFA with an axicon-produced HOFI channel, as discovered via Optimas and FBPIC.
| Working group | WG1 |
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