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Phase-locked laser-wakefield electron acceleration

Nature Photonics volume 14, pages 475–479 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Subluminal and superluminal light pulses have attracted considerable attention in recent decades1,2,3,4, opening perspectives in telecommunications, optical storage and fundamental physics5. Usually achieved in matter, superluminal propagation has also been demonstrated in vacuum with quasi-Bessel beams6,7 or spatio-temporal couplings8,9. Although, in the first case, the propagation was diffraction free, but with hardly controllable pulse velocities and limited to moderate intensities, in the second, high tunability was achieved, but with substantially lengthened pulse durations. Here we report a new concept that extends these approaches to relativistic intensities and ultrashort pulses by mixing spatio-temporal couplings and quasi-Bessel beams to independently control the light velocity and intensity. When used to drive a laser-plasma accelerator10, this concept leads to a new regime that is dephasing free, where the electron beam energy gain increases by more than one order of magnitude.

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Fig. 1: Schematic view of laser-plasma acceleration with an axiparabola, without and with STCs.
Fig. 2: Comparison, for a constant-intensity focal line, of the maximum peak intensity and velocity evolution with and without STCs, stemming from linear spectral propagation simulations in vacuum.
Fig. 3: Evolution of energy gain with accelerator, laser and plasma parameters.
Fig. 4: PIC simulations of phase-locked acceleration and standard LPA, with an externally injected electron bunch and the same laser energy.

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The data that support the plots and findings of this paper are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the European Research Council through the project XFive (grant no. 339128), the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under reference ANR-19-TERC-0001-01 (project TGV), Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman, Israel Science Foundation, VATAT support and the French embassy in Israel through a Chateaubriand fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée, Ecole polytechnique – ENSTA – CNRS – Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    C. Caizergues, S. Smartsev, V. Malka & C. Thaury

  2. Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    S. Smartsev & V. Malka

Authors
  1. C. Caizergues
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  2. S. Smartsev
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  3. V. Malka
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  4. C. Thaury
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Contributions

C.C. and C.T. jointly proposed the concept of phase-locked acceleration, using axiparabola and spatio-temporal couplings. The idea was then developed by C.C. with advice from V.M. and C.T. C.C. and C.T. established the theoretical background, while C.C. and S.S. developed codes for optimizing and simulating axiparabola focus. Simulations were carried out by C.C. Finally, C.C. and C.T. wrote the manuscript with help from V.M. and S.S.

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Correspondence to C. Caizergues.

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Competing interests

C.T. and S.S. have filed a patent application (no. EP18305810.6) on axiparabola. The authors declare no other competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary discussion and Figs. 1 and 2.

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Caizergues, C., Smartsev, S., Malka, V. et al. Phase-locked laser-wakefield electron acceleration. Nat. Photonics 14, 475–479 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0657-2

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