| 1. |
- Albert, F., et al.
(författare)
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Betatron x-ray radiation from laser-plasma accelerators driven by femtosecond and picosecond laser systems
- 2018
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Ingår i: Physics of Plasmas. - : AIP Publishing. - 1089-7674 .- 1070-664X. ; 25:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A comparative experimental study of betatron x-ray radiation from laser wakefield acceleration in the blowout and self-modulated regimes is presented. Our experiments use picosecond duration laser pulses up to 150 J (self-modulated regime) and 60 fs duration laser pulses up to 10 J (blowout regime), for plasmas with electronic densities on the order of 1019cm-3. In the self-modulated regime, where betatron radiation has been very little studied compared to the blowout regime, electrons accelerated in the wake of the laser pulse are subject to both the longitudinal plasma and transverse laser electrical fields. As a result, their motion within the wake is relatively complex; consequently, the experimental and theoretical properties of the x-ray source based on self-modulation differ from the blowout regime of laser wakefield acceleration. In our experimental configuration, electrons accelerated up to about 250 MeV and betatron x-ray spectra with critical energies of about 10-20 keV and photon fluxes between 108and 1010photons/eV Sr are reported. Our experiments open the prospect of using betatron x-ray radiation for applications, and the source is competitive with current x-ray backlighting methods on multi-kilojoule laser systems.
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| 2. |
- Ferri, Julien, 1990, et al.
(författare)
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Proton acceleration by a pair of successive ultraintense femtosecond laser pulses
- 2018
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Ingår i: Physics of Plasmas. - : AIP Publishing. - 1070-664X .- 1089-7674. ; 25
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2018 Author(s). We investigate the target normal sheath acceleration of protons in thin aluminum targets irradiated at a relativistic intensity by two time-separated ultrashort (35 fs) laser pulses. When the full-energy laser pulse is temporally split into two identical half-energy pulses, and using target thicknesses of 3 and 6 μm, we observe experimentally that the second half-pulse boosts the maximum energy and charge of the proton beam produced by the first half-pulse for time delays below ∼0.6-1 ps. Using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we examine the variation of the proton energy spectra with respect to the time-delay between the two pulses. We demonstrate that the expansion of the target front surface caused by the first pulse significantly enhances the hot-electron generation by the second pulse arriving after a few hundreds of fs time delay. This enhancement, however, does not suffice to further accelerate the fastest protons driven by the first pulse once three-dimensional quenching effects have set in. This implies a limit to the maximum time delay that leads to proton energy enhancement, which we theoretically determine.
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| 3. |
- Luís Martins, Joana, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Radiation emission in laser-wakefields driven by structured laser pulses with orbital angular momentum
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322 .- 2045-2322. ; 9:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- High-intensity X-ray sources are invaluable tools, enabling experiments at the forefront of our understanding of materials science, chemistry, biology, and physics. Laser-plasma electron accelerators are sources of high-intensity X-rays, as electrons accelerated in wakefields emit short-wavelength radiation due to betatron oscillations. While applications such as phasecontrast imaging with these betatron sources have already been demonstrated, others would require higher photon number and would benefit from increased tunability. In this paper we demonstrate, through detailed 3D simulations, a novel configuration for a laser-wakefield betatron source that increases the energy of the X-ray emission and also provides increased flexibility in the tuning of the X-ray photon energy. This is made by combining two Laguerre-Gaussian pulses with non-zero net orbital angular momentum, leading to a rotation of the intensity pattern, and hence, of the driven wakefields. The helical motion driven by the laser rotation is found to dominate the radiation emission, rather than the betatron oscillations. Moreover, the radius of this helical motion can be controlled through the laser spot size and orbital angular momentum indexes, meaning that the radiation can be tuned fully independently of the plasma parameters.
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