2020/08/20 by J. P. Palastro, B. Malaca, J. Vieira +5 · 21 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Acceleration #Breaking wave #Electric field #Electron #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Plasma #Plasma acceleration #Population #Superluminal motion #Two-stream instability #Waves in plasmas #physics.acc-ph #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/5.0036627
published in Physics of Plasmas 28(1) (American Institute of Physics)
arxiv created 2020/08/20 · openalex created_date 2020/09/01 · openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · arxiv updated 2021/02/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Laser wakefield accelerators rely on the extremely high electric fields of nonlinear plasma waves to trap and accelerate electrons to relativistic energies over short distances. When driven strongly enough, plasma waves break, trapping a large population of the background electrons that support their motion. Aside from limiting the maximum electric field, this trapping can lead to accelerated electron bunches with large energy spreads. Here, we introduce a novel regime of plasma wave excitation and wakefield acceleration that allows for arbitrarily high electric fields while avoiding the deleterious effects of unwanted trapping. The regime, enabled by spatiotemporal shaping of laser pulses, exploits the property that nonlinear plasma waves with superluminal phase velocities cannot trap charged particles and are therefore immune to wave breaking.