Control of quasi-monoenergetic electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators by adjusting shock density profile
ORAL
Abstract
High-level control of a laser-plasma accelerator (LPA) using a shock injector was demonstrated by systematically varying the shock injector profile, including the shock angle, up-ramp width and shock position. Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation explored how variations in the shock profile impacted the injection process and confirmed results obtained through acceleration experiments. These results establish that, by adjusting shock position, up-ramp, and angle, beam energy, energy spread, and pointing can be controlled. As a result, e-beam were highly tunable from 25 to 300 MeV with \textless 8{\%} energy spread, 1.5mrad divergence and \textless 1mrad pointing fluctuation. This highly controllable LPA represents an ideal and compact beam source for the ongoing MeV Thomson photon experiments. Set-up and initial experimental design on a newly constructed one hundred TW laser system will be presented.
*This work is supported by the US DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and by the US DOE National Nuclear Security Administration, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation R&D (NA22).
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