Highly collimated electron acceleration by longitudinal laser fields in a hollow channel

ORAL

Abstract

A longitudinal electric field is associated with the transverse profile of a laser pulse. Exploiting this longitudinal laser electric field, a novel mechanism to achieve collimated super-ponderomotive electron acceleration is proposed. To realize efficient acceleration, a tailored hollow-core target is used to suppress diffraction and enhance the longitudinal laser electric field. In addition, this structure eliminates the net restoring force that produces transverse electron oscillations in laser-generated ion channels, allowing for improved collimation of accelerated electrons. We use two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation to demonstrate how energy is transferred from the laser to the electrons.

*This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1632777 and used the particle-in-cell code EPOCH, which is funded in part by the UK EPSRC grants EP/G054950/1, EP/G056803/1, EP/G055165/1 and EP/ M022463/1. Simulations were performed using HPC resources of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Presenters

  • Zheng Gong

    • Univ of Beijing/Univ of Texas - Austin
    • Univ of Texas - Austin / Univ of Beijing

Authors

  • Zheng Gong

    • Univ of Beijing/Univ of Texas - Austin
    • Univ of Texas - Austin / Univ of Beijing
  • Alex Robinson

    • Rutherford Appleton Lab
    • Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory
  • Oliver Jansen

    • Univ of California - San Diego
  • Tao Wang

    • Univ of California - San Diego
  • Alexey Arefiev

    • Univ of California - San Diego