Author: Hegelich, B.M.
Paper Title Page
WEYD1
Ultrahigh Energy Electrons From Laser Wakefield Accelerators  
 
  • B.M. Hegelich
    The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
 
  We report peak electron energies well in excess of 10 GeV from a laser wakefield accelerator. Proof-of-principle experiment have been performed at the Texas Petawatt laser using a 10 cm long gas cell filled with helium gas and seeded by metallic nanoparticles. Greater than 10 GeV electron energies have been observed repeatedly in multiple independent experiments. This results fulfill a major milestones in DOE’s Advanced Accelerator Strategy Report from 2016 and open up the potential of laser wakefield accelerators as high energy machines or as drivers for laser-driven XFELs. Compared with other wakefield acceleration schemes, our scheme is straightforward since it requires only a gas cell and a source of nanoparticles for electron injection. No external guiding or heating mechanisms are employed. The nanoparticle-assisted laser wakefield acceleration can control all the electron beam parameters: charge, energy spread, energy, emittance, and the number of bunches in the beam. Bunch charges are on the order of a few nanocoulomb for the whole beam and in the 100s pC range in the high energy part, an order of magnitude increase over previous results at greater than 5 GeV.  
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