The extremely high electric fields sustainable by a plasma make the Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) the most compact technique to generate very highly relativistic electron beams in the GeV regime. The limited repetition rate and low efficiency of this technology has, to date, prevented to unleash its full potential as a unique source for basic research, biomedical applications and high flux sources of secondary radiations as hard X-rays and gamma-rays. In very recent years different works show a new research direction on electron acceleration at 1 kHz repetition rate.
In this talk I will show the laser-driven acceleration of unprecedented, collimated (2 mrad) and quasi-monoenergetic (ΔE/E = 25%) electron beams with energy up to 50 MeV at 1 kHz repetition rate. The laser driver is the in-house developed L1-Allegra multi-cycle (15 fs) 1 kHz OPCPA system, operating at 26 mJ (1.7 TW).
Said innovative results have been achieved in the new Laser Wakefield ALFA platform for user experiments developed at ELI-Beamlines.
The scalability of the driver laser technology and the electron beams reported in this work pave the way towards developing high brilliance X-ray sources for medical imaging, innovative devices for brain cancer treatment and represent a step forward to the realization of a kHz GeV electron beamline.
We present a four-pass tomography setup for the characterization of the density distribution of a gas jet. The data acquired with a wavefront sensor is processed using a tomography algorithm, providing a 3D reconstruction of the gas density distribution. We applied this technique to characterize a supersonic gas jet produced by a de Laval nozzle and obstructed by a razor blade in ambient pressure, which are among the common targets used in high-repetition rate laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) experiments. The results revealed the complex density distribution of the jet, including the formation of barrel shocks. The four-pass tomography setup with a wavefront sensor provides a valuable tool for the detailed characterization of gas jets, enabling the investigation of fundamental fluid mechanics phenomena and contributing to the development of advanced propulsion systems and LWFA gas targets.
One of the major objectives of the ELI Beamlines project is to employ the state-of-the-art high power lasers for the generation of ultra-short pulses of particles and X-rays with unprecedented parameters to deliver stable beamline capacity to serve the broad scientific and industrial user community. The development of laser plasma-based X-ray sources at ELI beamlines, especially the ELI Gammatron beamline based on the laser plasma accelerator (LPA) is presented here. The ELI Gammatron beamline is capable of providing X-ray pulses of energies from 1-100 keV in the Betatron scheme and up to few MeV’s in the inverse Compton scheme. A dedicated LPA-based Betatron X-ray source, developed at the ELI plasma physics platform (P3) will serve as an active diagnostic of the high energy density (HED) plasma and laboratory astrophysics multi-beam experiments. In addition to this, a novel scheme for enhancing the X-ray flux of the betratron sources was proposed based on nonlinear resonances in a two-colour laser field interaction. A high-sensitivity optical probing technique for characterizing gas targets for LPA was also developed in-house to support the beamline development.
The emergence of petawatt lasers focused on relativistic intensities enables all-optical laboratory generation of intense magnetic fields in plasmas, which are of great interest due to their ubiquity in astrophysical phenomena. We report our study of the generation of spatially extended and long-lived intense magnetic fields. We show that such magnetic fields, scaling up to the gigagauss range, can be generated by the interaction of petawatt laser pulses with relativistically underdense plasma. With three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we investigate the generation of magnetic fields with strengths up to 10^10 G and perform a large multi-parametric study of the magnetic field in dependence on dimensionless laser amplitude a0 and normalized plasma density ne/nc. The numerical results yield scaling laws that closely follow derived analytical result B ≈ (a0ne/nc)^1/2, and further show a close match with previous experimental works. Furthermore, we show in three-dimensional geometry that the decay of the magnetic wake is governed by current filament bending instability, which develops similarly to von Kármán vortex street in its nonlinear stage. We envision interactions of relativistic electrons with studied intense magnetic wakes for probing of strong field quantum electrodynamics in magnetized plasmas. Our results pave the way towards the generation of intense, tunable, and long-lived magnetic fields in plasmas at various laboratory conditions, which lead to innumerable applications in plasma physics, fundamental physics, and laboratory astrophysics.
The ELI Beamlines project as one pillar of the Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC provides laser-driven secondary sources of EUV/XUV, X-ray and relativistic charged particles offering unique pump/probe experimental schemes for dynamic studies on the ultrafast time-scale. Moreover, these sources can be coupled together offering experimental schemes beyond the IR-laser-driven pump/probe approach. While the majority of facility scientific equipment is in progress of installation, numerous secondary beamlines have already been validated. Here we present secondary sources of XUV radiation via high harmonic generation (HHG) in gases and hard X-ray Cu-Ka source as well as user endstations that were connected to the beamline. The ELI Beamlines HHG/PXS supports experiments in three scientific end stations: MAC, ELIps, and T-REX, while plasma betatron source and lUIS will serve their own beamlines and endstations.
Three main paths have been selected within the ELI Beamlines research program for transforming driving laser pulses into brilliant beams of short wavelength radiation: High-order harmonic generation in gases, Plasma X-ray sources, and sources based on relativistic electron beams accelerated in laser-plasma. For each of these research areas, dedicated beamlines are built to provide a unique combination of X-ray sources to the user community. The employment of these beamlines has a well-defined balance between fundamental science and applications in different fields of science and technology. Besides those beamlines, a plasma betatron radiation source driven by the PW-class HAPLS laser system is being commissioned in the plasma physics platform to serve as a unique diagnostic tool for dense plasma and warm dense matter probing.
We present a new interferometric technique for gas jets density characterization employing a Wollaston shearing interferometer. The distinctive feature of this setup is the double pass of the probe beam through the gas target facilitated by a relay-imaging object arm that images the object on itself and preserves the spatial information. The double pass results in two-fold increase of sensitivity at the same time as the relay-imaging enables the characterization of gas jets with arbitrary gas density distribution by tomographic reconstruction. The capabilities of the double-pass Wollaston interferometer are demonstrated by tomographic density reconstruction of rotationally non-symmetric gas jets that are used as gas targets for the betatron X-ray source at ELI-Beamlines.
Three main paths are being developed within the ELI research program for transforming driving laser pulses into bursts of bright short wavelength radiation: high-order harmonic generation in gases, plasma X-ray sources and sources based on relativistic electron beams accelerated in laser plasma. For each of these research areas, dedicated beamlines are built to provide a unique combination of X-ray sources to the scientific community. The application of these beamlines has a well-defined balance between fundamental science and applications in different fields of science and technology. Here we summarize the current status of those user beamlines and we introduce new diagnostics devices developed within the implementation phase of the project, namely compact XUV spectrometer and beam profiler that is using only one fixed detector and an imaging Michelson interferometer with increased sensitivity for low density gas jet characterization.
In a plasma wakefield accelerator, an intense laser pulse propagates in an under-dense plasma that drives a relativistic plasma wave in which electrons can be injected and accelerated to relativistic energies within a short distance. These accelerated electrons undergo betatron oscillation and emit a collimated X-ray beam along the direction of electron velocity. This X-ray source is characterised with a source size of the order of a micrometer, a pulse duration of the order of femtosecond, and with a high spectral brightness. This novel X-ray source provides an excellent imaging tool to achieve unprecedented high-resolution image through phase contrast imaging. The phase contrast technique has the potential to reveal structures which are invisible with the conventional absorption imaging. In the X-ray phase contrast imaging, the image contrast is obtained thanks to phase shifts induced on the X-rays passing through the sample. It involves the real part of refractive index of the object. Here we present high-resolution phase contrast X-ray images of two biological samples using laser-driven Betatron X-ray source.
Relativistic electron beams accelerated by laser wakefield have the ability to serve as sources of collimated,
point-like and femtosecond X-ray radiation. Experimental conditions for generation of stable quasi-monoenergetic
electron bunches using a femtosecond few-terawatt laser pulse (600 mJ, 50 fs) were investigated as they are crucial
for generation of stable betatron radiation and X-ray pulses from inverse Compton scattering. A mixture of helium
with argon, and helium with an admixture of synthetic air were tested for this purpose using different backing
pressures and the obtained results are compared. The approach to use synthetic air was previously proven to stabilize
the energy and energy spread of the generated electron beams at the given laser power. The accelerator was operated
in nonlinear regime with forced self-injection and resulted in the generation of stable relativistic electron beams with
an energy of tens of MeV and betatron X-ray radiation was generated in the keV range. A razor blade was tested to
create a steep density gradient in order to improve the stability of electron injection and to increase the total electron
bunch charge. It was proven that the stable electron and X-ray source can be built at small-scale facilities, which
readily opens possibilities for various applications due to availability of such few-terawatt laser systems in many
laboratories around the world.
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