Laser-driven electron beam generation for secondary photon sources with few terawatt laser pulses

摘要

Relativistic electron beams accelerated by laser wakefield have the ability to serve as sources of collimated, point-like and femtosecond X-ray radiation. Experimental conditions for generation of stable quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches using a femtosecond few-terawatt laser pulse (600 mJ, 50 fs) were investigated as they are crucial for generation of stable betatron radiation and X-ray pulses from inverse Compton scattering. A mixture of helium with argon, and helium with an admixture of synthetic air were tested for this purpose using different backing pressures and the obtained results are compared. The approach to use synthetic air was previously proven to stabilize the energy and energy spread of the generated electron beams at the given laser power. The accelerator was operated in nonlinear regime with forced self-injection and resulted in the generation of stable relativistic electron beams with an energy of tens of MeV and betatron X-ray radiation was generated in the keV range. A razor blade was tested to create a steep density gradient in order to improve the stability of electron injection and to increase the total electron bunch charge. It was proven that the stable electron and X-ray source can be built at small-scale facilities, which readily opens possibilities for various applications due to availability of such few-terawatt laser systems in many laboratories around the world.