Optimal Beam Loading in a Laser-Plasma Accelerator
Physical Review Letters2021Vol. 126(17), pp. 174801–174801
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2021 papers
Manuel Kirchen, Sören Jalas, Philipp Messner, Paul Winkler, Timo Eichner, Lars Hübner, Thomas Hülsenbusch, L. Jeppe, T. Parikh, Matthias Schnepp, Andreas R. Maier
Abstract
Applications of laser-plasma accelerators demand low energy spread beams and high-efficiency operation. Achieving both requires flattening the accelerating fields by controlled beam loading of the plasma wave. Here, we optimize the generation of an electron bunch via localized ionization injection, such that the combination of injected current profile and averaged acceleration dynamics results in optimal beam loading conditions. This enables the reproducible production of 1.2% rms energy spread bunches with 282 MeV and 44 pC at an estimated energy-transfer efficiency of ∼19%. We correlate shot-to-shot variations to reveal the phase space dynamics and train a neural network that predicts the beam quality as a function of the drive laser.
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