Measurements of the Critical Power for Self-injection of Electrons in a Laser Wakefield Accelerator

Download or read book Measurements of the Critical Power for Self-injection of Electrons in a Laser Wakefield Accelerator written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 6 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laser wakefield acceleration study has been performed in the matched, self-guided, blow-out regime where a 10 J, 60 fs laser produced 720 ± 50 MeV quasi-monoenergetic electrons with a divergence of [Delta][theta] = 2.85 ± 0.15 mRad. While maintaining a nearly constant plasma density (3 x 1018 cm−3), a linear electron energy gain was measured from 100 MeV to 700 MeV when the plasma length was scaled from 3 mm to 8 mm. Absolute charge measurements indicate that self-injection occurs when P/P{sub cr}> 4 and saturates around 100 pC for P/P{sub cr}> 12. The results are compared with both analytical scalings and full 3D particle-in-cell simulations.