2023/11/24 by Shuang Liu, Fei Li, Liu, Shuang +11 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Accelerator Physics (physics.acc-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Laser Design and Applications #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.14269
openalex publication_date 2023/11/24 · openalex created_date 2023/11/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The emergence of multi-petawatt laser facilities is expected to push forward the maximum energy gain that can be achieved in a single stage of a LWFA to tens of GeV, which begs the question - is it likely to impact particle physics by providing a truly compact particle collider? Colliders have very stringent requirements on beam energy, acceleration efficiency and beam quality. In this article, we propose a LWFA scheme that can for the first time simultaneously achieve hitherto unrealized acceleration efficiency from the laser to the electron beam of >20% and a sub-one percent energy spread using a stepwise plasma structure and a nonlinearly chirped laser pulse. Three-dimensional high-fidelity simulations show that the nonlinear chirp can effectively mitigate the laser waveform distortion and lengthen the acceleration distance. This combined with an inter-stage rephasing process in the stepwise plasma can triple the beam energy gain compared to that in a uniform plasma for a fixed laser energy thereby dramatically increasing the efficiency. A dynamic beam loading effect can almost perfectly cancel the energy chirp that arises during the acceleration, leading to the sub-percent energy spread. This scheme is highly scalable and can be applied to peta-watt LWFA scenarios. Scaling laws are obtained that suggest electron beams with energy gain of >100 GeV, charge of 2 nC, and with an energy spread <1% can be realized with a high laser pulse to particle beam energy transfer efficiency in a LWFA driven by a peta-watt laser, which could be the basis for a proof of concept of one arm of a future electron-positron collider.